Social preferences, accountability, and wage bargaining

We assess the extent of preferences for employment in a collective
wage bargaining situation with heterogeneous workers. We vary the
size of the union and introduce a treatment mechanism transforming
the voting game into an individual allocation task. Our results
show that highly productive workers do not take employment of low
productive workers into account when making wage proposals,
regardless of whether insiders determine the wage or all workers.
The level of pro-social preferences is small in the voting game,
while it increases as the game is transformed into an individual
allocation task. We interpret this as an accountability effect.