In settings where financial incentives are costly to implement, we explore the use of employee referrals to reduce worker moral hazard. Employers can exploit referrer-worker social preferences towards each other by conditioning the referrer rewards on worker effort. In order to test this theory, we design a laboratory experiment with employers, referrers and workers using information on real friendship relationships extracted from Facebook. The design allows us to pin down the effect of social preferences between worker and referrer in reducing worker moral hazard. Our main result is that workers put in higher effort when referrals are used relative to anonymous hiring. The experimental evidence suggests that directed altruism is a plausible mechanism underlying referrer and worker choices.

在实施经济激励措施成本高昂的环境中，我们探索了使用员工推荐来减少工人道德风险的情况。雇主可以通过根据工作人员的努力来确定推荐人的奖励，从而利用推荐人与工作者之间的社会偏好。为了检验该理论，我们使用从Facebook提取的有关真实友谊关系的信息，设计了一个与雇主，推荐人和工人进行的实验室实验。该设计使我们能够确定工人和推荐人之间的社会偏好对减少工人道德风险的影响。我们的主要结果是，相对于匿名雇用，在使用转介时，工作人员会付出更大的努力。实验证据表明，定向利他主义是潜在的推荐人和工作人员选择的合理机制。