NBER Publications by Gary Charness

This paper attempts to isolate, document, and measure a social effect of incentivizing people in teams. In a field experiment featuring exogenous team formation and opportunities for repeated social interactions over time, we find social effects that are nearly as large as direct pecuniary effects: the team compensation system implemented in our paper induced agents to choose their effort as if they valued a marginal dollar of compensation for their teammate three-fourths as much as they value a dollar of their own compensation. We conclude that social effects of team incentives exist and can be decisive in motivating effort-intensive tasks.

In labor markets, the ratchet effect refers to a situation where workers subject to performance pay choose to restrict their output, because they rationally anticipate that firms will respond to higher output levels by raising output requirements or cutting pay. We model this effect as a multi-period principal-agent problem with hidden information, and study its robustness to labor market competition both theoretically and experimentally. Consistent with our theoretical model, we observe substantial ratchet effects in the absence of competition, which is nearly eliminated when competition is introduced; this is true regardless of whether market conditions favor firms or workers.

This chapter surveys the contributions of laboratory experiments to labor economics. We begin with a discussion of methodological issues: why (and when) is a lab experiment the best approach; how do laboratory experiments compare to field experiments; and what are the main design issues? We then summarize the substantive contributions of laboratory experiments to our understanding of principal-agent interactions, social preferences, union-firm bargaining, arbitration, gender differentials, discrimination, job search, and labor markets more generally.

We study worker and firm behavior in an efficiency-wage environment where co-workers' wages may potentially influence a worker's effort. Theoretically, we show that an increase in workers' responsiveness to co-workers' wages should lead profit-maximizing firms to compress wages under quite general conditions. Our laboratory experiments, on the other hand, show that --while workers' effort choices are highly sensitive to their own wages-- effort is not affected by co-workers' wages. As a consequence, even though firms in our experiment tended to compress wages when wages became public information, this did not raise their profits. Our experimental evidence therefore provides little support for the notion that inter-worker equity concerns can make wage compression, or wage secrecy, a profit-...