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...

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...

We study whether people's preferences in an unbalanced market are affected by whether they are on the excess supply side or the excess demand side of the market. Our analysis is based on the comparison of behavior between two types of experimental gift exchange markets, which vary only with...

Previous studies have found evidence of a self-serving bias in bargaining and dispute resolution. We use experimental data to test for this effect in a simulated labor relatonship. We find a consistent discrepancy between employer beliefs and employee actions that can only be attributed to...