Social preferences, accountability, and wage bargaining

Kocher, Martin G.; Poulsen, Odile; Zizzo, Daniel J. (2017): Social preferences, accountability, and wage bargaining. In: Social Choice and Welfare, Vol. 48, No. 3: pp. 659-678

Abstract

We experimentally test preferences for employment in a collective wage bargaining situation with heterogeneous workers. We vary the size of the union and introduce a treatment mechanism transforming the voting game into an individual allocation task. Our results show that highly productive workers do not take employment of low productive workers into account when making wage proposals, regardless of whether only union members determine the wage or all workers. The level of pro-social preferences is small in the voting game, but it increases if the game becomes an individual allocation task. We interpret this as an accountability effect.

• Item Type: Journal article
• Faculties: Economics
• Subjects: 300 Social sciences > 330 Economics
• ISSN: 0176-1714
• Language: English