Reciprocity in Labor Market Relationships: Evidence from an Experiment Across High-Income OECD Countries [Dataset]

We study reciprocity in the labor market context. To this end, we conducted a bilateral gift exchange experiment comparing behavior of subjects from five high-income OECD countries, among them two liberal market economies (USA and Israel), two coordinated market economies (Germany and Japan) and a Mediterranean economy (Spain). We conjecture a higher wage dispersion, higher rejection rate and lower effort (per wage offer), and a higher income inequality in liberal than in coordinated market economies. We observe that all subject pools demonstrate increasing
effort levels and decreasing rejection rates in wage offers. We also find considerable differences between subject pools in both one-shot and repeated relationships. The most striking difference in behavior are not between subjects from liberal and coordinated market economies, but rather between the subjects of two European countries, Germany and Spain.