Kube, et al. (2012) on Non-Monetary Gift Exchange in the Workplace

Sebastian Kube, Michel André Maréchal, and Clemens Puppe, “The Currency of Reciprocity: Gift Exchange in the Workplace.” American Economic Review 102(4): 1644-1662, June 2012.

• The authors set up a field experiment, where people were hired for only three hours to type bibliographical information into a database. The workers did not know at the time that they were participating in an experiment. 

• The workers were paid a pre-agreed wage, but at the start, most of them (all except for the baseline sample) were presented with an unexpected gift. The main issue was whether they received a monetary bonus of 7 euro, or a thermos bottle that cost 7 euro. 

• The cash gift did not increase worker productivity relative to the “no gift” baseline, but the bottle brought about a 25% productivity hike. If workers could choose, they (18 of 22) took the cash, but having the choice still boosted their performance: as if they received the bottle without a choice. It didn’t matter if workers were informed or not of the price of the thermos bottle. 

• The largest performance enhancement came when the gift was seven euro that was cleverly presented in the form of an origami shirt-person. 

• Quality (accuracy) of typing performance (as opposed to quantity) also improved with the gift treatments, including with the cash gift. Origami cash also had the largest quality improvement, whereas the thermos bottle barely affected quality relative to no gift; cash (sans origami) was marginally better than the bottle on the quality dimension. 

• Is it the thought that counts?