Pay Beliefs and the Amenity-Pay Tradeoff

Economics > General Economics [Submitted on 1 Jun 2026] Title:Pay Beliefs and the Amenity-Pay Tradeoff View PDF HTML (experimental)Abstract:This paper studies how workers' beliefs about pay shape the tradeoffs between pay and workplace amenities. We design a multi-stage incentivized survey experiment that combines hypothetical choice experiments with elicited beliefs about starting salaries in real jobs and randomly varies the provision of explicit pay information. Although stated preferences imply sizable willingness to pay for amenities consistent with prior literature, baseline beliefs about salaries in real jobs are systematically biased along two margins: respondents under-predict starting salaries by 18% and expect higher-amenity jobs to pay more, substantially over-predicting the amenity-pay gradient. Exposure to pay information raises mean pay beliefs for similar jobs by 4% and reduces belief dispersion by 15%, but does not alter the strong positive association between perceived pay and advertised amenities, leaving the amenity-pay tradeoffs in stated choices essentially unchanged. While workers have strong preferences for workplace amenities, the tradeoffs they perceive deviate sharply from those present under full information. Current browse context: econ.GN References & Citations Loading... Bibliographic and Citation Tools Bibliographic Explorer (What is the Explorer?) Connected Papers (What is Connected Papers?) Litmaps (What is Litmaps?) scite Smart Citations (What are Smart Citations?) Code, Data and Media Associated with this Article alphaXiv (What is alphaXiv?) CatalyzeX Code Finder for Papers (What is CatalyzeX?) DagsHub (What is DagsHub?) Gotit.pub (What is GotitPub?) Hugging Face (What is Huggingface?) ScienceCast (What is ScienceCast?) Demos Recommenders and Search Tools Influence Flower (What are Influence Flowers?) CORE Recommender (What is CORE?) arXivLabs: experimental projects with community collaborators arXivLabs is a framework that allows collaborators to develop and share new arXiv features directly on our website. Both individuals and organizations that work with arXivLabs have embraced and accepted our values of openness, community, excellence, and user data privacy. arXiv is committed to these values and only works with partners that adhere to them. Have an idea for a project that will add value for arXiv's community? Learn more about arXivLabs.