Are Workers Paid their Marginal Products

Abstract

Status is, like Coase's social costs, a reciprocal phenomenon. Given that one person's gain in status can occur only at the expense of a loss in status for others, and that workers are free to choose their coworkers, it follows that the competitive wage structure within a firm must be one in which individual wage differences understate individual differences in marginal products.' The purpose of this paper is to examine a variety of empirical evidence that relates to this proposition about the firm's internal wage structure. The paper is organized as follows. Section I briefly summarizes the theoretical considerations that govern competitive wage determination when status matters to people and firms are viewed as voluntary associations of workers. Section II then confronts the predictions of Section I by examining pay and productivity schedules for a group of sales occupations for which these schedules are relatively easily observed. Section II also examines the relationship between wages and productivity for a sample of university professors, an occupation in which individual productivity differences are, for a variety of obvious reasons, relatively more difficult to measure. All of the evidence examined is consistent with the hypothesis that, within firms, wage rates vary substantially less than do individual productivity values. Section III discusses additional observations and evidence that bear on this same hypothesis. It suggests that the implicit market for status may strongly influence the ways in which firms are organized to carry out the tasks they perform. Section IV concludes by considering the claim that egalitarian internal wage structures arise because of considerations. It argues that the concept of equity appears very closely linked to the concept of status, and suggests a strategy for assigning monetaty value to the equity considerations that so often dominate public policy decisions.