« The Other Ex-Ante Moral Hazard in Health: You are too Healthy | Main | Progress on Dual Tracking? »
Assorted links
1. Crisis vs. recession. Via Felix Salmon, here is a wise account from India, it is still likely to be true.
2. Are tips discriminatory against African-Americans?
3. Money does make you happy -- if you give it away (via Jacqueline Passey)
4. The economics of Gawker bloggers
Posted by Tyler Cowen on March 21, 2008 at 10:22 AM in Web/Tech | Permalink
Comments
Tips could only be described as discriminatory if it could be assumed that there are no relevant performance differences between the groups being compared - which apparently this study could not do, and the assumption is not reasonable a priori. So they have not demonstrated discrimination.
It is also difficult for external observers to capture and measure exactly what 'performance' entails in service industries. Appearance, manners, style - all might be regarded by the customer as a significant aspect of the service provided.
For instance I would be very interested to see a similar study done on tipping in relation to young attractive women - for instance in bars or waiting table. In 'Why Men Earn More' Warren Farrell describes how some extremely attractive women (he terms them 'genetic celebrities') can earn extraordinary sums in tips - orders of magnitude greater than their co-workers.
Posted by: BGC at Mar 21, 2008 12:20:55 PM
"Jacqueline Passey" ??
Her blog site disappeared shortly after her marriage last year and I have never seen anything from her again. Has she started a new blog? Do you have the url?
I ran across her a couple of years ago when I was searching for references to Walter Oi. Amid all the journal citations I found, she had posted some comments about him in her blog. She was funny.
Posted by: RP Johnson at Mar 21, 2008 3:29:49 PM
No, I just email Tyler links that I think he'd be interested in.
Posted by: Jacqueline at Mar 21, 2008 4:21:36 PM
(For those who care -- Still very happily married, still in Las Vegas, quit the job at the robotics company to do the full-time grad school thing, am working towards becoming an accountant. Life is good, but busy.)
Posted by: Jacqueline at Mar 21, 2008 4:31:40 PM
BGC,
Some quality of service measurement was done and it was opposite of the people that received higher tips. Granted, it was a limited sample size, but it seems that service differences were probably minimal, at worst.
… subjectively rated the quality of service higher for black drivers than for white drivers (with an average rating of 4.5 out of 5 for black drivers versus an average of 3.3 for white drivers).
Posted by: Mo at Mar 21, 2008 11:43:53 PM
BGC,
Some quality of service measurement was done and it was opposite of the people that received higher tips. Granted, it was a limited sample size, but it seems that service differences were probably minimal, at worst.
… subjectively rated the quality of service higher for black drivers than for white drivers (with an average rating of 4.5 out of 5 for black drivers versus an average of 3.3 for white drivers).
Posted by: Mo at Mar 21, 2008 11:44:31 PM
The more I think about it, the more I think tipping is a bad practice for ordinary restaurants to employ. Not for racial reasons necessarily, but I think it has little connection with productivity, which is the opposite of what tipping is intended to do--incentive servers to do a better job at pleasing and attracting customers. Not nearly as many people give serious thought to how much they tip, lots of people don't tip at all or give tiny perfunctory tips to every server. It leads to widespread undertipping in my experience.
I don't see any connection between tipping and productivity until you get to certain restaurants, like Hooters, or fine dining establishments and the like.
Posted by: Jacob Oost at Mar 22, 2008 12:06:14 AM
Mo - yes, but the following sentence was the one that I focused on: 'But we only succeeded in completing 10 audit rides with participating drivers — so at the end of the day, it was difficult for us to assess whether minorities received poorer tips because of providing poorer service.'
The function of tipping should be the focus of the piece, not supposed evidence of racial discrimination. There is a very powerful publication and media bias in favour of those research projects which appear to confirm prejudice against the usually named 'minorities' - and some very modest surveys are immortalized as 'evidence' of widespread covert 'ism' - as I predict this one will be.
Two places where I experienced very good service were the US - which has a big (high percentage) tipping culture - and Iceland - where there is no tipping and it would be regarded as offensive to offer a tip. This may suggest that tipping is not critical to service, but then again the US and Iceland are not really comparable...
Posted by: BGC at Mar 22, 2008 3:07:20 AM
