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Workplace Democracy in the Lab

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Listed:
  • Mellizo, Philip

    (College of Wooster)

  • Carpenter, Jeffrey P.

    (Middlebury College)

  • Matthews, Peter Hans

    (Middlebury College)

Abstract

While intuition suggests that empowering workers to have some say in the control of the firm is likely to have beneficial incentive effects, empirical evidence of such an effect is hard to come by because of numerous confounding factors in the naturally occurring data. We report evidence from a real-effort experiment confirming that worker performance is sensitive to the process used to select the compensation contract. Groups of workers that voted to determine their compensation scheme provided significantly more effort than groups that had no say in how they would be compensated. This effect is robust to controls for the compensation scheme implemented and worker characteristics (i.e., ability and gender).

Suggested Citation

  • Mellizo, Philip & Carpenter, Jeffrey P. & Matthews, Peter Hans, 2011. "Workplace Democracy in the Lab," IZA Discussion Papers 5460, Institute of Labor Economics (IZA).
    • Handle: RePEc:iza:izadps:dp5460
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    More about this item

    Keywords

    real-effort experiment; workplace democracy; decision control rights;
    All these keywords.

    JEL classification:

    • C92 - Mathematical and Quantitative Methods - - Design of Experiments - - - Laboratory, Group Behavior
    • J33 - Labor and Demographic Economics - - Wages, Compensation, and Labor Costs - - - Compensation Packages; Payment Methods
    • J54 - Labor and Demographic Economics - - Labor-Management Relations, Trade Unions, and Collective Bargaining - - - Producer Cooperatives; Labor Managed Firms

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