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Record W4292466556 · doi:10.1111/caje.12607

Piece‐rate cuts and ratchet effects

2022· article· en· W4292466556 on OpenAlexafffundvenue
Bruce Shearer

Bibliographic record

VenueCanadian Journal of Economics/Revue canadienne d économique · 2022
Typearticle
Languageen
FieldSocial Sciences
TopicExperimental Behavioral Economics Studies
Canadian institutionsCenter for Interuniversity Research and Analysis on OrganizationsUniversité Laval
FundersSocial Sciences and Humanities Research Council of CanadaFonds de Recherche du Québec-Société et Culture
KeywordsEarningsPiece workEconomicsRatchetWork (physics)Labour economicsRatchet effectMonetary economicsMicroeconomicsFinanceEngineeringManagement

Abstract

fetched live from OpenAlex

Abstract I use a quasi experiment, conducted in the field, to evaluate how the workers of an economic firm responded to threats to cut their piece rates. During the study, the piece rate paid to workers was initially set above the regular rate, given working conditions. In a commitment treatment this high rate was paid without any threat of revision. During a non‐commitment trial, the high rate was accompanied by a threat from management to reduce the rate if, after two days of work, average earnings were too high. The empirical results display strong ratchet effects. Workers withheld output by 16% under non‐commitment relative to commitment. The firm eventually reduced the piece rate from the initial high rate, but left it above the regular rate, giving workers the possibility to extract rents. Workers showed no tendency to restrict output during this phase of the study.

Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.

How this classification was reachedexpand

Full frame distilled prediction

Teacher imitation

Not 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.

metaresearch head score (Codex)0.001
metaresearch head score (Gemma)0.000
Version: codex-gemma-dda1882f352aValidation status: machine_predicted_unvalidated
Candidate categoriesMeta-epidemiology (narrow), Science and technology studies
Consensus categoriesnone
DomainCandidate signal: none · Consensus signal: none
Study designCandidate signal: Theoretical or conceptual · Consensus signal: none
GenreCandidate signal: Empirical · Consensus signal: Empirical
Teacher disagreement score0.584
Threshold uncertainty score1.000

Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category

CategoryCodexGemma
Metaresearch0.0010.000
Meta-epidemiology (narrow)0.0000.000
Meta-epidemiology (broad)0.0010.000
Bibliometrics0.0000.000
Science and technology studies0.0020.000
Scholarly communication0.0000.000
Open science0.0010.000
Research integrity0.0000.000
Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)0.0000.000

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.

Opus teacher head0.110
GPT teacher head0.224
Teacher spread0.114 · how far apart the two teachers sit on this one work
Validation statusscore_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it

Classification

machine, unvalidated

Machine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.

Study designTheoretical or conceptual
Domainnot available
GenreEmpirical

How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".

Quick stats

Citations3
Published2022
Admission routes3
Has abstractyes

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