Interdependent Preferences and the Competitive Wage Structure

This article shows by example that when workers care about relative income and are free to choose their coworkers, the equilibrium distribution of wages within firms must be less dispersed than the corresponding distribution of marginal products. An implicit market for within-firm status is shown to produce welfare gains by sorting workers among firms in accordance with how much they are willing to pay for high rank. The resulting equilibrium Pareto dominates allocations in which each worker is paid his marginal product.