Reciprocity in Labor Relations: Evidence from a Field Experiment with Long-Term Relationships
Why this work is in the frame
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Bibliographic record
Abstract
We followed field workers administering a household survey over a 12-week period and examined how their reciprocal behavior towards the employer responded to a sequence of exogenous wage increases and wage cuts. To disentangle the effects of reciprocal behavior from other explicit incentives that occur naturally in long-term employment relationships, we devised a novel measure of effort that not only captures the notion of work morale but that field workers perceived as unmonitored. While wage increases had no significant effect, wage cuts led to a strong and significant decline in unmonitored effort. This finding provides clear evidence of a highly asymmetric reciprocity response to wage changes. Our estimates further imply that field workers quickly adapted to higher wages and revised their reference point accordingly when deciding on reciprocity. Finally, we consider a second measure of effort that was explicitly monitored and found no significant effect to any of the wage changes. This lack of impact illustrates that explicit incentives can easily outweigh the effects of reciprocity and highlights the importance of having a measure of effort that workers perceive as unmonitored when testing for reciprocity in long-term relationships.
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Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it