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When No Bad Deed Goes Punished: A Relational Contracting Experiment in Ghana

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  • Elwyn Davies
  • Marcel Fafchamps

Abstract

This paper uses experimental methods to study the impact of limited enforcement and reputation on employer-worker relations in labour markets in Ghana. Participants, students recruited from universities in Accra, Ghana are designated as either employers or workers and play a gift-exchange game on a tablet computer. In this game, employers make wage offers to workers, who can then choose to accept or reject and, after accepting, what effort level to exert. Five treatments were used to assess the impact of limited enforcement, competition between employers and reputation. Each participants plays four games, consisting of five trading periods. We find different results from earlier experiments in developed countries: while these experiments have found strong evidence for relational contracting and conditional reciprocity, we do not find evidence for this. We find that a subgroup of workers exerts very low effort levels, but that this low effort of the workers is not punished by employers, who are not responsive in their wage offers to what the workers did previously. As a result, on average, the workers capture most of the profits. Introducing competition or a multilateral reputation mechanism does not significantly improve this.

Suggested Citation

  • Elwyn Davies & Marcel Fafchamps, 2015. "When No Bad Deed Goes Punished: A Relational Contracting Experiment in Ghana," CSAE Working Paper Series 2015-08, Centre for the Study of African Economies, University of Oxford.
  • Handle: RePEc:csa:wpaper:2015-08
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    Cited by:

    1. Davies, Elwyn & Fafchamps, Marcel, 2017. "Pledging, Praising and Shaming: Experimental Labour Markets in Ghana," IZA Discussion Papers 10520, Institute of Labor Economics (IZA).

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    More about this item

    Keywords

    Relational contracting; conditional reciprocity; gift-exchange game; punishment strategies; Ghana;
    All these keywords.

    JEL classification:

    • C71 - Mathematical and Quantitative Methods - - Game Theory and Bargaining Theory - - - Cooperative Games
    • D2 - Microeconomics - - Production and Organizations
    • D86 - Microeconomics - - Information, Knowledge, and Uncertainty - - - Economics of Contract Law
    • E24 - Macroeconomics and Monetary Economics - - Consumption, Saving, Production, Employment, and Investment - - - Employment; Unemployment; Wages; Intergenerational Income Distribution; Aggregate Human Capital; Aggregate Labor Productivity
    • O16 - Economic Development, Innovation, Technological Change, and Growth - - Economic Development - - - Financial Markets; Saving and Capital Investment; Corporate Finance and Governance

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