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Recent experiments show that feedback transmission can mitigate opportunistic behavior in repeated social dilemmas. Two nonexcludable explanations have been investigated: strategic signaling and nonmonetary sanctioning. This literature builds on the intuition that under both partner matching (where the same groups of players interact many times) and stranger matching (where groups change continuously), feedback may work as a nonmonetary sanctioning device, but only the former also allows for strategic signaling. Empirical evidence on the two explanations is mixed. Moreover, the usual design may give rise to confounding matching protocol effects.

My experiment provides a novel empirical testbed for different channels by which feedback – costless disapproval points – may affect behavior in a repeated public goods game. In particular, it is based on a random matching scheme that neutralizes the confounding effects of different matching protocols on behavior.

The transmission of feedback is found to foster prosocial behavior. The data favor the nonmonetary sanctioning explanation rather than the signaling hypothesis.

This study provides a novel set of evidence that (i) communication may mitigate selfishness in social dilemmas and (ii) the source of this phenomenon may be linked to the emotional reaction that communication evokes in humans.

This paper provides an experimental examination of the effects of ostracism on cooperation. Ostracism is one of the most radical forms of peer pressure. More generally, ostracism is the exclusion of disapproved individuals from interaction with a social group. By performing a laboratory experiment involving a public good game with exclusion, the paper provides empirical evidence that threats of exclusion increase contributions. The results show that subjects exclude their peers for two reasons. Subjects are willing to punish unfair behaviors (non‐strategic reason) and expect changes in behavior in response to exclusions (strategic reason).

It is known that the self‐employed are generally more satisfied than salaried workers. The aim of this paper is to test whether this phenomenon is particularly found for the first‐generation self‐employed.

French and British panel data are analysed, which include information on various measures of job satisfaction, and the respondent's parents' occupation. Job satisfaction regressions were run in which the first‐ and second‐generation self‐employed were distinguished between.

The study finds that first‐generation self‐employed (those whose parents were not self‐employed) are more satisfied overall than are the second‐generation self‐employed. The findings are consistent between the British and French data.

While the results are the same in the two countries considered, further validation work should extend the analysis across countries. While the authors are fairly sure that the second‐generation self‐employed do worse, they cannot precisely distinguish between comparison to one's parents, constrained occupational choice, and selection effects due to lower barriers to self‐employment entry.

The authors believe that this is one of the first papers to distinguish between types of self‐employed in terms of their higher satisfaction. The finding that parents' labour force status continues to have a significant impact on their children's job satisfaction argues for a more systematic consideration of intergenerational factors in the analysis of labour markets.

Introduces the special issue on personnel economics and outlines the themes discussed in the papers contained within.

We augment a standard bilateral gift-exchange game to allow employees to communicate their gratitude for, or disapproval toward, the wage assigned to them by their manager. This provides employees with a means of reciprocation or emotion expression toward the employee which is not available in a standard gift-exchange game and may substitute for the higher-than-equilibrium efforts commonly seen in this environment. We find that employees express gratitude or disapproval according to the wage received, but these messages are not a substitute for monetary reciprocation as the relationship between wages and effort is unchanged. These results suggest that employees view the messages as a form of emotional expression independent from rewarding or punishing managers. Average wage levels are little affected by allowing messages, although wages do fall more over time in the absence of messages and individual managers’ wage choices are affected by the messages they receive.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate whether the gender composition of a fund management team influences investment decision-making behavior. Specifically, we focus on how portfolio choice is affected by team risk aversion and loss aversion.

Using an experimental economics approach, the paper examines the relationship between gender diversity and investment decisions. Teams of four persons each were given the task of making investment portfolio management decisions.

The paper finds that team composition does influence financial decisions with regard to the assessment of risk and loss. The paper finds evidence that a male presence increases the probability of selecting a higher risk investment. However, the all male teams are not the most risk seeking. Moreover, having a male presence can increase loss aversion.

In the context of workforce composition, these results could have important implications for team investment decisions driven by the assessment of risk and return tradeoffs. To curb excessive risk taking and loss aversion, the findings would suggest that understanding the role of gender diversity in risk management would be useful in effecting change.

The purpose of this paper is to examine whether managers punish more and work harder in teams with peer monitoring when it is less costly to punish in a two-period, one-shot horizon.

An experiment is conducted in a two-period horizon with two treatments. The structure of performance measures makes it costless or costly to punish in the second period.

The results find punishing, contingent on first-period strategies, was significantly greater when it was costless compared to costly, as expected. Working, which is analogous to cooperating in prisoner dilemma games, was also significantly greater in the first and second periods when punishing was costless.

This paper is informative about the potential benefits of performance measures in dynamic team environments, which can be challenging and costly to develop. It adds insight into the design of self-discipline and tasks in teams which might help increase productivity.

This paper is related to the research on indefinite horizons, which attributes increases in cooperation to the existence of subgame perfect strategies to cooperate and potential gains from future cooperation. In comparison, this study examines the effects of the existence of subgame perfect strategies to work in isolation from the potential gains from future interactions. In addition, it examines whether their potential benefits depend on the cost of punishing when punishing is subgame perfect in a one-shot horizon.

The overall goal of science is to build a valid and reliable body of knowledge about the functioning of the world and how applying that knowledge can change it. As personnel and human resources management researchers, we aim to contribute to the respective bodies of knowledge to provide both employers and employees with a workable foundation to help with those problems they are confronted with. However, what research on research has consistently demonstrated is that the scientific endeavor possesses existential issues including a substantial lack of (a) solid theory, (b) replicability, (c) reproducibility, (d) proper and generalizable samples, (e) sufficient quality control (i.e., peer review), (f) robust and trustworthy statistical results, (g) availability of research, and (h) sufficient practical implications. In this chapter, we first sing a song of sorrow regarding the current state of the social sciences in general and personnel and human resources management specifically. Then, we investigate potential grievances that might have led to it (i.e., questionable research practices, misplaced incentives), only to end with a verse of hope by outlining an avenue for betterment (i.e., open science and policy changes at multiple levels).

This paper aims to present an overview of the various ethical, societal and critical issues that micro- and nanotechnology-based small, energy self-sufficient sensor systems raise in different selected application fields. An ethical approach on the development of these technologies was taken in a very large international, multitechnological European project. The authors approach and methodology are presented in the paper and, based on this review, the authors propose general principles for this kind of work.

The authors’ approach is based on a great amount of experience working together in multi-disciplinary teams. Ethical issues have usually been handled in the authors’ work to some degree. In this project, the authors had the opportunity to emphasise the human view in technological development, utilise the authors’ experience from previous work and customise the authors’ approach to this particular case. In short, the authors created a wide set of application scenarios with technical and application field experts in the authors’ research project. The scenarios were evaluated with external application field experts, potential consumer users and ethics experts.

Based on the authors’ experiences in this project and in previous work, the authors suggest a preliminary model for construction activity within technology development projects. The authors call this model the Human-Driven Design approach, and Ethics by Design as a more focussed sub-set of this approach. As all enabling technologies have both positive and negative usage possibilities, and so-called ethical assessment tends to focus on negative consequences, there are doubts from some stakeholders about including ethical perspectives in a technology development project.

The authors argue that the ethical perspective would be more influential if it were to provide a more positive and constructive contribution to the development of technology. The main findings related to the ethical challenges based on the actual work done in this project were the following: the main user concerns were in relation to access to information, digital division and the necessity of all the proposed measurements; the ethics experts highlighted the main ethical issues as privacy, autonomy, user control, freedom, medicalisation and human existence.

Various technology assessment models and ethical approaches for technological development have been developed and performed for a long time, and recently, a new approach called Responsible Research and Innovation has been introduced. The authors’ intention is to give a concrete example for further development as a part of the development of this approach.

The authors’ study in this particular case covers various consumer application possibilities for small sensor systems. The application fields studied include health, well-being, safety, sustainability and empathic user interfaces. The authors believe that the ethical challenges identified are valuable to other researchers and practitioners who are studying and developing sensor-based solutions in similar fields.

The authors’ study covers various consumer application possibilities of small sensor systems. The studied application fields include health, well-being, safety, sustainability and empathic user interfaces. The findings are valuable to other researchers and practitioners who are studying and developing sensor-based solutions to similar fields.

The purpose of this paper is to better understand why many researchers do not have a profile on social networking sites (SNS), and whether this is the result of conscious decisions.

Thematic analysis was conducted on a large qualitative data set from researchers across three levels of seniority, four countries and four disciplines to explore their attitudes toward and experiences with SNS.

The study found much greater scepticism toward adopting SNS than previously reported. Reasons behind researchers’ scepticism range from SNS being unimportant for their work to not belonging to their culture or habits. Some even felt that a profile presented people negatively and might harm their career. These concerns were mostly expressed by junior and midlevel researchers, showing that the largest opponents to SNS may unexpectedly be younger researchers.

A limitation of this study was that the authors did not conduct the interviews, and therefore reframing or adding questions to specifically unpack comments related to attitudes, feelings or the use of SNS in academia was not possible.

By studying implicit attitudes and experiences, this study shows that instead of being ignorant of SNS profiles, some researchers actively opt for a non-use of profiles on SNS.