TY  - JOUR
AU  - Gneezy,Uri
AU  - List,John A.
TI  - Putting Behavioral Economics to Work: Testing for Gift Exchange in Labor Markets Using Field Experiments
JF  - National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper Series
VL  - No. 12063
PY  - 2006
Y2  - March 2006
UR  - http://www.nber.org/papers/w12063
L1  - http://www.nber.org/papers/w12063.pdf
N1  - Author contact info:
Uri Gneezy
Graduate School of Business
University of Chicago
1101 E. 58th Street
Chicago, IL 60637
Tel: 773/834-8198
Fax: 773/702-0458
E-Mail: ugneezy@gsb.uchicago.edu

John List
Department of Economics
University of Chicago
1126 East 59th
Chicago, IL 60637
Tel: 301/405-1288
Fax: 301/314-9091
E-Mail: jlist@uchicago.edu
AB  - Recent discoveries in behavioral economics have led scholars to question the underpinnings of neoclassical economics. We use insights gained from one of the most influential lines of behavioral research -- gift exchange -- in an attempt to maximize worker effort in two quite distinct tasks: data entry for a university library and door-to-door fundraising for a research center. In support of the received literature, our field evidence suggests that worker effort in the first few hours on the job is considerably higher in the "gift" treatment than in the "non-gift treatment." After the initial few hours, however, no difference in outcomes is observed, and overall the gift treatment yielded inferior aggregate outcomes for the employer: with the same budget we would have logged more data for our library and raised more money for our research center by using the market-clearing wage rather than by trying to induce greater effort with a gift of higher wages.
ER  -