The moral economy is a set of institutionalized rules, norms, and values that guide action in market economies. Historically, the norm of wage negotiations has been a central pillar of the U.S. moral economy, but research suggests that this may be changing. In the present study, the authors seek to evaluate whether the norm of wage negotiations is decoupled from the U.S. moral economy. Results of a factorial survey experiment administered to a quota sample of U.S. adults ( N = 707) indicate that the norm of wage negotiations is weak: it is largely bipolar, conditional, and of a low to moderate intensity, with disagreement over the norm as well as the circumstances demarcating the norm. These social cleavages, however, do not fall along demographic lines: the character of the norm is comparable across groups. These findings reveal that there has been an erosion of the distributional norms underlying the U.S. moral economy.

Gender differences in wage negotiations is a popular explanation for why the gender gap in pay persists in the United States. In this study, we use data from an artificial wage negotiation experiment (N = 330) to interrogate the gender-negotiation link, and to test whether gender role attitudes (GRAs) moderate this association. Our experiment yields three principal discoveries. First, men are more likely to select into negotiations than women, but this effect varies by GRAs. As GRAs become more traditional, men enter negotiations at a much higher rate than women, but for non-traditional GRAs we observe no gender differences in selection. Second, while men and women are proficient at knowing when to negotiate, men and women are much less proficient when they harbor traditional GRAs. Third, profits are equivalent for men and women, and traditional men are no more effective than women—regardless of their GRAs—at securing higher profits. Our findings suggest that traditional women should “lean-in”, and that traditional men should “lean-out”.

The moral economy is a set of institutionalized rules, norms, and values that guide action in market economies. Historically, the norm of wage negotiations has been a central pilar of the U.S. moral economy, but extant research suggests that this may be changing. In the present study, we seek to evaluate whether the norm of wage negotiations is decoupled from the U.S. moral economy. To do so, we map the character of the norm of wage negotiations, and identify the extent to which the norm is strong or weak along four dimensions: polarity, conditionality, intensity, and consensus. Results of a factorial survey experiment administered to a quota sample of U.S. adults (N = 707) indicate that the norm of wage negotiations is weak: it is largely bipolar, conditional, and of a low-to-moderate intensity, with disagreement over the norm as well as the circumstances demarcating the norm. These deep social cleavages, however, do not fall along demographic lines: the character of the norm is comparable across demographic groups. Overall, our findings support the idea that there has been an erosion of the distributional norms underlying the U.S. moral economy.