Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgments for Reprinted Articles
- Introduction
- The Theory of Underemployment in Densely Populated Backward Areas
- Another Possible Source of Wage Stickiness
- Equilibrium Unemployment as a Worker Discipline Device
- Involuntary Unemployment as a Principal-Agent Equilibrium
- Labor Contracts as Partial Gift Exchange
- A Model of the Natural Rate of Unemployment
- Job Queues and Layoffs in Labor Markets with Flexible Wages
- Hierarchy, Ability, and Income Distribution
- Incentives, Productivity, and Labor Contracts
- Work Incentives, Hierarchy, and Internal Labor Markets
Labor Contracts as Partial Gift Exchange
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 10 January 2011
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgments for Reprinted Articles
- Introduction
- The Theory of Underemployment in Densely Populated Backward Areas
- Another Possible Source of Wage Stickiness
- Equilibrium Unemployment as a Worker Discipline Device
- Involuntary Unemployment as a Principal-Agent Equilibrium
- Labor Contracts as Partial Gift Exchange
- A Model of the Natural Rate of Unemployment
- Job Queues and Layoffs in Labor Markets with Flexible Wages
- Hierarchy, Ability, and Income Distribution
- Incentives, Productivity, and Labor Contracts
- Work Incentives, Hierarchy, and Internal Labor Markets
Summary
This paper explains involuntary unemployment in terms of the response of firms to workers' group behavior. Workers' effort depends upon the norms determining a fair day's work. In order to affect those norms, firms may pay more than the market-clearing wage. Industries that pay consistently more than the market-clearing wage are primary, and those that pay only the market-clearing wage are secondary. Thus, this paper also gives a theory for division of labor markets between primary and secondary.
INTRODUCTION
In a study of social relations among workers at a utility company in the eastern United States, George Homans [1953, 1954] observed that a small group of young women (doing a job called “cash posting”) exceeded the minimum work standards of the firm by a significant margin (i.e., on average by 15 percent). Most of these women neither desired nor expected promotion in the firm in return for their troubles. Why did they do it?
Section II shows that the standard neoclassical model cannot simultaneously explain both the behavior of the firm and the behavior of the cash posters. But, as shown in Section III, application of a standard sociological model does explain the behavior of both the young women and their employer. According to this model, in their interaction workers acquire sentiment for each other and also for the firm.
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- Information
- Efficiency Wage Models of the Labor Market , pp. 66 - 92Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1986
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