Although reciprocity is fundamental to all social orders, management research offers few reviews of the concept's theoretical origins and current applications. To help bridge this gap, we elucidate the dominant understandings of reciprocity, ask which areas of research emerge from them, and...

The presence of workers who reciprocate higher wages with greater effort can have important consequences for labor markets. Knowledge about the determinants of reciprocal effort choices is, however, incomplete. We investigate the role of fairness perceptions and social preferences in workers'...

This paper reports the results from a controlled field experiment designed to investigate the causal effect of public recognition on employee performance. We hired more than 300 employees to work on a three-hour data-entry task. In a random sample of work groups, workers unexpectedly received...

We conduct a field experiment where we vary both the presence of a gift exchange wage and the effect of the worker's effort on the manager's payoff. The results indicate a strong complementarity between the initial wage gift and the agent's ability to repay the gift. We collect information on...

The market for retail financial products (e.g. investment funds or insurances) is marred by information asymmetries. Clients are not well informed about the quality of these products. They have to rely on the recommendations of advisors. Incentives of advisors and clients may not be aligned,...

We examine the gift exchange hypothesis on both the quantity and quality of output using a hybrid field-laboratory labor market experiment. We recruited participants to enter survey data for a well-known charitable organization. Workers were paid either a high or low wage. We find that although...

Empirical work on Akerlof's theory of gift exchange in labor markets has concentrated on the fair wage-effort hypothesis. In fact, however, the theory also contains a social component that stipulates that homogenous agents that are employed for the same wage level will exert more effort,...

Über Rufbereitschaft und Arbeit auf Abruf liegen bisher wenig belastbare Erkenntnisse vor. Kennzeichnend für beide Arbeitszeitformen ist, dass die Beschäftigten durch einen Ruf aus ihrer unbezahlten Freizeit heraus die Arbeit aufnehmen. Dadurch werden Erholungsphasen unterbrochen und...

We document the importance of negatively reciprocal inclinations in labor relationships by showing that a retrenchment of pension rights, which is perceived as unfair, causes a larger reduction in job motivation the stronger workers' negatively reciprocal inclinations are. We exploit unique...