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The Effect of Structured Emotion Expression on Reciprocity in Bilateral Gift Exchange

Experiments in Organizational Economics

ISBN: 978-1-78560-964-0, eISBN: 978-1-78560-963-3

Publication date: 18 December 2016

Abstract

We augment a standard bilateral gift-exchange game to allow employees to communicate their gratitude for, or disapproval toward, the wage assigned to them by their manager. This provides employees with a means of reciprocation or emotion expression toward the employee which is not available in a standard gift-exchange game and may substitute for the higher-than-equilibrium efforts commonly seen in this environment. We find that employees express gratitude or disapproval according to the wage received, but these messages are not a substitute for monetary reciprocation as the relationship between wages and effort is unchanged. These results suggest that employees view the messages as a form of emotional expression independent from rewarding or punishing managers. Average wage levels are little affected by allowing messages, although wages do fall more over time in the absence of messages and individual managers’ wage choices are affected by the messages they receive.

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Acknowledgements

Acknowledgments

We thank the NSF for financial support (SES – 1227298), participants at the 2015 ESA meetings for their helpful comments, and Philip Brookins and Laura Magee for their work as research assistants.

Citation

Cooper, D.J. and Lightle, J.P. (2016), "The Effect of Structured Emotion Expression on Reciprocity in Bilateral Gift Exchange", Experiments in Organizational Economics (Research in Experimental Economics, Vol. 19), Emerald Group Publishing Limited, Leeds, pp. 1-18. https://doi.org/10.1108/S0193-230620160000019001

Publisher

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Emerald Group Publishing Limited

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