Lab Labor: What can Labor Economists Learn from the Lab?

By Gary Charness, Peter Kuhn. Social Science Research Network, 2010

358 citations recorded by the source corpus.

This chapter surveys the contributions of laboratory experiments to labor economics. We begin with a discussion of methodological issues: when (and why) is a lab experiment the best approach; how do laboratory experiments compare to field experiments; and what are the main design issues? We then summarize the substantive contributions of laboratory experiments to our understanding of principal-agent interactions, social preferences, union-firm bargaining, arbitration, gender differentials, discrimination, job search, and labor markets more generally.

Subfields: Economics and Econometrics, Safety Research

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/03f6845390b23f4e22919d73ef1f9eb158b59d9e

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Citations in the corpus

A Structural Analysis of Disappointment Aversion in a Real Effort Competition (2012, neutral): “Charness and Kuhn (2010) summarize the experimental literature.”
Field experiments in labor economics (2010, methodology): “Since the Renaissance, fundamental advances making use of the experimental method in the physical and biological sciences 1In this Handbook, Charness and Kuhn (2010) provide a useful discussion of extant laboratory studies in the area of labor economics.”
A multidisciplinary survey on discrimination analysis (2013, background): “See Charness and Kuhn (2011) and Levitt and List (2007) for an in-depth discussion of these issues.”
Gender and the Labor Market: What Have We Learned from Field and Lab Experiments? (2014, neutral): “G. Azmat, B. Petrongolo, submitted 2014”
A survey of experimental research on contests, all-pay auctions and tournaments (2014, background): “…is especially problematic because in a labor-management context, where rank-order tournaments are often employed in the field (for a review see Charness and Kuhn 2011), a high variance in individual performance can impose a substantial cost on employers and reduce the overall efficiency of…”
Why real leisure really matters: incentive effects on real effort in the laboratory (2014, positive): “As a result, the field of experimental labor economics (Charness and Kuhn, 2011) has emerged to test many of the predictions that have been generated by incentive and contract theories (Laffont and Martimort, 2002; Bolton and Dewatripont, 2005).”
Ode to the sea: Workplace Organizations and Norms of Cooperation (2016, background): “…evidence suggests that the extent of such behaviour goes beyond what is predicted by standard self-interest maximisation, as some individuals exhibit pro-sociality with genetically unrelated others in the absence of reputational benefits (Charness and Kuhn, 2011, and the references therein).”