Does Pay Inequality Affect Worker Effort? Experimental Evidence
通过实验室实验，研究在效率工资环境中，同事工资是否影响工人努力，发现工人努力只受自身工资影响，不受同事工资影响，质疑了公平关切解释薪酬政策的观点。
We study worker behavior in an efficiency-wage environment in which coworkers’ wages can influence a worker’s effort. Theoretically, we show that an increase in workers’ responsiveness to coworkers’ wages should lead profit-maximizing firms to compress wages. Our laboratory experiments, by contrast, show that while workers’ effort choices are highly sensitive to their own wages, effort is not affected by coworkers’ wages. This casts doubt on the notion that workers’ concerns with equity might explain pay policies such as wage compression or wage secrecy.