Gift Exchange in a Multi‐Worker Firm
通过实验比较一对一和一对四的礼物交换游戏，发现雇主增加工人数量后，工人努力水平仅略有下降，表明礼物交换在更大规模劳动力中依然有效。
One of the main findings of a large body of gift exchange experiments is that a considerable fraction of workers reward higher wages with higher effort. These results are observed for simple one-employer-one-worker relationships. In this article we investigate whether they generalise to the more realistic situation in which the employer employs several workers. We compare a bilateral gift exchange game with a treatment in which each employer has four workers. We find that effort levels in the latter treatment are only marginally lower. Gift exchange thus appears to be robust to increases in the size of the workforce.