Social ties at work and effort choice: Experimental evidence from Tanzania
通过坦桑尼亚小企业主的实验，研究工人与雇主的社会关系是否影响工作努力，发现平均无影响，但无子女的工人更努力。
Many firms hire workers via social networks. Whether workers who are socially connected to their employers exert more effort on the job is an unsettled debate. We address this question through a novel experiment with small-business owners in Tanzania. Participants are paired with a worker who conducts a real-effort task, and receive a payoff that depends on the worker’s effort. Some business owners are randomly paired with workers they know, while others are paired with strangers. We find that being connected to one’s employer does not affect workers’ effort on average, but increases the effort of workers without children. Our results are consistent with workers having an altruistic drive in exerting effort when they work for someone they know, which fades away when their valuation of private income becomes stronger. • Novel lab-experiment to test if social ties to employers affect workers’ effort. • Implemented with 313 real-world SME entrepreneurs in Tanzania. • We do not detect an effect of social ties on the effort of the average worker. • We find a positive effect among workers without children. • Results consistent with effect driven by altruism to socially connected employers.