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The gift of being chosen

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  14 March 2025

Natalia Montinari ,
Antonio Nicolò  and
Regine Oexl
Natalia Montinari
Affiliation:
Department of Economics, Lund University, Box 7082, SE-220 07 Lund, Sweden
Antonio Nicolò
Affiliation:
School of Social Sciences, University of Manchester, Arthur Lewis Building, Manchester M13 9PL, UK
Regine Oexl*
Affiliation:
University of Innsbruck, Universitätsstr. 15, 6020 Innsbruck, Austria
*
[email protected]
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Abstract

We report evidence from an experiment where an employer selects one of two workers to perform a task for a fixed compensation. Workers differ in their ability. The employer’s payoff depends on the worker’s ability and on a non-contractible effort that the worker exerts once employed. We find that selected workers exert an effort higher than the minimum enforceable one. When the employers can send a free-text form message to the selected worker, workers with low ability exert significantly higher effort than the workers with high ability. The difference in effort overcompensates the difference in ability.

Keywords

Gift exchangeGratitudeEmpathy wageCommunicationExperiment

JEL classification

D2: Production and Organizations
Type
Original Paper
Information
Experimental Economics , Volume 19 , Issue 2 , June 2016 , pp. 460 - 479
Copyright
Copyright © 2015 Economic Science Association

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Footnotes

Electronic supplementary material The online version of this article (doi:https://doi.org/10.1007/s10683-015-9449-9) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.

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