Do people care about intentions? Good intentions often do not produce good results when a person tries to do something nice for someone else. In this paper, we ask under what circumstances do people pay attention to outcomes and under what circumstances do they focus on intentions. While the...

This book explores this apparent change in the employment contract from a new perspective. Whereas earlier studies in this area focused on the rigidities in the quantity side of the employment relationship, e.g., changes in job tenure and rates of displacement, the authors focus on the price...

Many authors have discussed a decline in internal labor markets and an apparent shift to a new employment contract, characterized by less commitment between employer and employee and more portable skills. These discussions occur without much evidence on what employment contract employees...

Many authors have discussed an apparent shift to a new employment contract characterized by less commitment between employer and employee, and closer ties between wages within the enterprise and those in the external labor market. We study the issue of when people in the U.S. and Canada feel pay...

When is sabotage acceptable? We use a quasi-experimental design to study the acceptability of several forms of rule-breaking at work. In addition to hypotheses from theories of fairness, we find retaliation is perceived as more acceptable if it is an act of omission instead of an act commission...

Do people care about intentions - even when good intentions do not produce good results? In our experiments we find that rates of punishment and reward react strongly to intentions (the wage a firm decides to pay) and more modestly to distributional outcomes (the higher or lower wage actually...

This paper investigates whether information about fairness types can be useful in lowering dispute costs and enhancing bargaining efficiency. An experiment was conducted in which subjects were first screened using a dictator game, with the allocations chosen used to separate participants into...

In experiments with two-person sequential games we analyze whether responses to favorable and unfavorable actions depend on the elicitation procedure. In our “hot” treatment the second player responds to the first player’s observed action while in our “cold” treatment we follow the...

While markets are often decentralized, in many other cases agents in one role can only negotiate with a proper subset of the agents in the complementary role. There may be proximity issues or restricted communication flows. For example, information may be transmitted only through word-of-mouth,...