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Do employers trust workers too little? An experimental study of trust in the labour market

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  • Stefano Caria
  • Paolo Falco
Abstract
We conduct a field experiment to investigate employers’ trust in workers. A sample of real entrepreneurs and workers from urban Ghana are respectively assigned to the roles of employers and employees. Employers have the option to hire (trust) an employee, who can in turn choose whether to exert effort (trustworthiness) in a real-effort task. By comparing employers’ expectations to workers’ revealed trustworthiness, we are able to detect potential misperceptions leading to sub-optimal hiring. We further devise two randomized treatments to test for the existence of expectation bias against specific worker categories and estimate the elasticity of employers’ beliefs with respect to new information. We find that employers significantly underestimate workers’ trustworthiness and this reduces their profit. Employees are aware of employers’ sub-optimal trust. Expectations are largely inelastic with respect to news and negative signals have a stronger (downward) effect than positive ones. Our results suggest that raising employers’ expectations would have a strong impact on hiring.

Suggested Citation

  • Stefano Caria & Paolo Falco, 2014. "Do employers trust workers too little? An experimental study of trust in the labour market," CSAE Working Paper Series 2014-07, Centre for the Study of African Economies, University of Oxford.
    • Handle: RePEc:csa:wpaper:2014-07
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    References listed on IDEAS

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    Cited by:

    1. World Bank, 2015. "Peru Building on Success," World Bank Publications - Reports 22984, The World Bank Group.
    2. Grover,Arti Goswami & Imbruno,Michele, 2020. "Using Experimental Evidence to Inform Firm Support Programs in Developing Countries," Policy Research Working Paper Series 9461, The World Bank.
    3. A Stefano Caria & Marcel Fafchamps, 2014. "Cooperation and Expectations in Networks: Evidence from a Network Public Good Experiment in Rural India," CSAE Working Paper Series 2014-33, Centre for the Study of African Economies, University of Oxford.

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    More about this item

    Keywords

    trust; trustworthiness; expectations; effort; hiring; microenterprise; learning; discrimination; experiment; African labour markets;
    All these keywords.

    JEL classification:

    • J23 - Labor and Demographic Economics - - Demand and Supply of Labor - - - Labor Demand
    • J71 - Labor and Demographic Economics - - Labor Discrimination - - - Hiring and Firing
    • O15 - Economic Development, Innovation, Technological Change, and Growth - - Economic Development - - - Economic Development: Human Resources; Human Development; Income Distribution; Migration
    • C9 - Mathematical and Quantitative Methods - - Design of Experiments

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