Workers’ participation in wage setting and opportunistic behavior

摘要

Our study analyzes the consequences of workers’ participation in the wage settingprocess on effort exertion. The experimental design is based on a modified gift-exchangegame where the degree of workers’ involvement in the wage setting process issystematically varied among the workers. The experimental data reveals that workers’participation leads actually to a decline in effort exertion which can be explained bynegative reciprocity of the respective worker. These results put some recently observedpositive effects from workers’ participation in experimental labor markets intoperspective and are more in line with the ambiguous results from empirical studies.