Effort and Comparison Income: Experimental and Survey Evidence

By Andrew E. Clark, David Masclet, Marie-Claire Villeval. Social Science Research Network, 2010

203 citations recorded by the source corpus.

The authors test the hypothesis that individual effort on the job depends both on one's own income and on the individual's position in the relevant income distribution. Combining experimental evidence from a gift-exchange game with multi-country ISSP survey data, they analyze the extent to which relative income affects an individual's effort, finding that an individual's rank in the income distribution more strongly determines effort than does others' average income, which suggests that comparisons are more ordinal than cardinal. Their experiment also reveals that comparisons over time affect effort: individuals who received higher income offers or enjoyed higher income rank in the past exerted lower levels of effort for a given current income and rank.

Subfields: Demography, Economics and Econometrics, Safety Research

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/6f1413ea70734e199084ea2980155fe95a4c6211

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Citations in the corpus

Performance appraisals and job satisfaction (2017, unknown): “…have shown that relative pay comparisons among employees, especially the individual rank in income distributions, have a negative impact on job and pay satisfaction and negatively affect effort provision (Brown et al., 2008; Clark et al., 2010; Card et al., 2012; Ockenfels et al. (forthcoming)).”
The Dark Side of Competition for Status (2014, background): “Indeed, there is strong evidence that people care not only about their own payoffs but also about social image and status (Ball and Eckel, 1998; Huberman et al., 2004; Rustichini, 2008; Eckel et al., 2009; Clark et al. 2010; Kosfeld and Neckermann, 2011).”
Heterogeneous Peer Effects and Rank Concerns: Theory and Evidence (2017, unknown): “…Mas, Moretti, and Saez 2012, Hamermesh 2001, Brown, Gardner, Oswald, and Qian 2008), turnover decisions (Kwon and Meyersson Milgrom 2009), effort (Clark, Masclet, and Villeval 2010), happiness 3See also Kang (2007), who studies peer effects among 7th and 8th graders in Korea using a…”
Attitudes to Income Inequality: Experimental and Survey Evidence (2014, background): “Clark et al. (2010) appeal to both survey and experimental evidence on the role of relative income in determining the level of effort that workers supply.”
The Promise and Success of Lab-Field Generalizability in Experimental Economics: A Critical Reply to Levitt and List (2011, background): “…teach- ers’ actual teaching time (the inverse of absenteeism) [Barr and Zeitlin, 2010] • Effort in a lab gift-exchange experiment with students in Lyon, France is positively correlated with both worker income and the worker’s income rank in a comparison group [Clark, Masclet, and Villeval, 2010].”
The Morale Effects of Pay Inequality (2016, unknown): “Related laboratory experiments have examined the effects of rank (Brown et al. 2008, Clark et al. 2010, Kuziemko et al. 2011).”
Social comparison and effort provision: evidence from a field experiment (2014, unknown): “0.”