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- Jena Economic Resea...
- Volume 5
- The Dark Side of Re...
The Dark Side of Reciprocity
- Abgebildete Person
- Erschienen
- 4. November 2011
- Nummer des Discussion-Papers
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2011-052
- Schlagwort(e)
-
Extra Effort
Horizontal Reciprocity
Negative Reciprocity
- Zusammenfsg.
-
Whether friendship or competitive relationships deserve to be encouraged in the workplace is not obvious a priori. In this paper we derive the conditions under which a profit-maximizing employer finds it convenient to induce a rat race among workers exhibiting horizontal reciprocity in order to obtain underpaid or unpaid extra effort. We characterize the optimal compensation scheme under both symmetric and asymmetric information about workers’ actions, and we also derive conditions for our result to hold in the presence of vertical reciprocity.
- article pub. typess JER
- Research article
- article languages JER
- Englisch
- JEL-Classification for JER
- D0 - General; D83 - Search; Learning; Information and Knowledge; Communication; Belief ; J33 - Compensation Packages; Payment Methods