Publication Type

Journal Article

Version

submittedVersion

Publication Date

6-2020

Abstract

Organizations often keep secret their decisions about what employees receive (e.g., salary, budgets, benefits) to manage fairness concerns. We propose that this can be counterproductive because of a mechanism we call the “escalation of deservingness under secrecy”, where the existence of peers can inflate one’s own sense of deservingness, even when the actual allocations to peers are unknown. Building on the ultimatum game, we developed a Paired Ultimatum Game (PUG) in which a player and a peer respondent engage with the same offeror simultaneously but with no direct competition between respondents. Across three experiments- a live interaction study as well as two scenario studies- using the PUG, we analyze the conditions under which transparency may be better than secrecy in preventing the escalation of deservingness perceptions.

Discipline

Organizational Behavior and Theory | Strategic Management Policy

Research Areas

Strategy and Organisation

Publication

Strategy Science

Volume

5

Issue

1

First Page

55

Last Page

70

Identifier

10.1287/stsc.2019.0100

Publisher

INFORMS (Institute for Operations Research and Management Sciences)

Copyright Owner and License

Authors

Additional URL

https://doi.org/10.1287/stsc.2019.0100

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