Abstract
We examine how wage claims influence the principal–agent relationship between firms and workers with hidden action by using laboratory experiments on a gift exchange game in which workers make payoff-irrelevant requests concerning their wage before the firm makes a wage offer. We compare the experimental results of this game with those of a gift exchange game without wage claims and find that wage claims reduce reciprocity regardless of the wage levels offered by the firm, resulting in shrinking the economic surplus in their labor contracts.
