Pay Beliefs and the Amenity-Pay Tradeoff
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摘要
This paper studies how workers’ beliefs about pay shape the tradeoffs between pay and workplace amenities. Using a four-stage incentivized survey that combines hypothetical choice experiments with elicited pay beliefs and randomized pay-information treatments, the authors document four core findings: (i) baseline pay beliefs are systematically biased downward (about 18% below actual starting pay) and are highly dispersed across individuals and jobs; (ii) respondents over-attribute pay to advertised amenities, yielding a steeper belief slope on amenity value than the actual pay slope, i.e., an augmenting-differentials pattern; (iii) a short-term pay-information intervention raises mean pay beliefs by about 4% and reduces belief dispersion by ~15% but does not alter the amenity-pay slope or stated tradeoffs; (iv) full information (persistent pay transparency) moves beliefs and choices toward higher-paying jobs, aligning implied willingness-to-pay for amenities with full-information benchmarks. These results help explain why hypothetical-choice studies show strong amenity valuations while observational data often fail to show compensating differentials, and they illustrate how pay-disclosure policies may reshape beliefs and, with sustained salience, tradeoffs [page::1]]
