The Norm of Wage Negotiations in the United States

Abstract

The moral economy is a set of institutionalized rules, norms, and values that guide action in market economies. Historically, the norm of wage negotiations has been a central pillar of the U.S. moral economy, but research suggests that this may be changing. In the present study, the authors seek to evaluate whether the norm of wage negotiations is decoupled from the U.S. moral economy. Results of a factorial survey experiment administered to a quota sample of U.S. adults ( N = 707) indicate that the norm of wage negotiations is weak: it is largely bipolar, conditional, and of a low to moderate intensity, with disagreement over the norm as well as the circumstances demarcating the norm. These social cleavages, however, do not fall along demographic lines: the character of the norm is comparable across groups. These findings reveal that there has been an erosion of the distributional norms underlying the U.S. moral economy.

Gender and Gender-Role Attitudes in Wage Negotiations: Evidence from an Online Experiment

“…This has led to a popular push for women to "lean-in" (Sandberg 2013) and negotiate for higher salaries. Indeed, interest in the idea that "leaning in" will substantially lower wage inequalities for women has motivated a large literature on what factors influence men's and women's negotiation decisions (Artz et al 2018;Card et al 2016;Demirović and Robbins 2022;Dittrich et al 2014;; Leibbrandt and List 2015;Luekemann and Abendroth 2018;Sauer et al 2021). Recent observational (Sauer et al 2021) and experimental ) research, however, has raised serious doubts about the efficacy of "leaning in," finding that "women positively select into negotiations and forcing women to negotiate hurts them," providing a "clear caution to leanin advice targeted toward women (Exley et al 2020: 850).…”