In Search of Workers' Real Effort Reciprocity – A Field and a LaboratoryExperiment

We present a field experiment to assess the effect of own and peer wage variations onactual work effort of employees with hourly wages. Work effort neither reacts to anincrease of the own wage, nor to a positive or negative peer comparison. This resultseems at odds with numerous laboratory experiments that show a clear own wagesensitivity on effort. In an additional real-effort laboratory experiment we show thatexplicit cost and surplus information that enables to exactly calculate employer’ssurplus from the work contract is a crucial pre-requisite for a positive wage-effortrelation. This demonstrates that employee’s reciprocity requires a clear assessment ofthe surplus at stake...