Wage Elasticities in Working and Volunteering: The Role of Reference Points in a Laboratory Study
通过实验室实验，研究工资对个人为自己工作和为慈善工作的努力程度的不同影响，发现为慈善工作时更高的工资反而导致更低的努力，这由参考点依赖理论解释。
We experimentally test how effort responds to wages—randomly assigned to accrue to individuals or to a charity—in the presence of expectations-based reference points or targets. When individuals earn money for themselves, higher wages lead to higher effort with relatively muted targeting behavior. When individuals earn money for a charity, higher wages instead lead to lower effort with substantial targeting behavior. A reference-dependent theoretical framework suggests an explanation for this differential impact: when individuals place less value on earnings, such as when accruing earnings for a charity instead of themselves, more targeting behavior and a more sluggish response to incentives should result. Results from an additional experiment add support to this explanation. When individuals select into earning money for a charity and thus likely place a higher value on those earnings, targeting behavior is muted and no longer generates a negative effort response to higher wages. Data and the online appendix are available at https://doi.org/10.1287/mnsc.2017.2870 . This paper was accepted by Uri Gneezy, behavioral economics.