Are People Fussy About Who They Work With? An Experimental Test of Becker’s Coworker Discrimination Hypothesis

We used an experiment to investigate whether people’s decisions over employment opportunities are affected by the ethnicity and sex of their potential future coworkers. University students (N = 1,406) were asked to state the lowest hourly wage rate at which they would be willing to accept a job on a campus food truck, where they would work alongside the food truck owner. The ethnicity and sex of the food truck owners were randomized across participants. Results showed no signs of coworker prejudice in terms of the probability of being interested in the job and reservation wage.