Despite the relatively extensive research on pay levels and the consequences of income disparities, little is known about which reference groups people choose for comparative evaluation of personal income and why different selection patterns emerge. The aim of this paper is to dig deeper for answers to the following three questions: (1) What are the most important reference groups for income comparisons? ...
Income comparisons are among the key mechanisms used to explain satisfaction and happiness, among other outcomes. Yet progress on the questions of who people use as social referents and whether differential selection patterns exist can only be made based on valid and reliable measures of pay referents included in large-scale population surveys. The German Socio-Economic Panel Study (SOEP) is pursuing ...
Social comparisons are an essential source of information about the self. Research in social psychology has shown individual variation in the tendency toward comparison with other people’s opinions and abilities, raising the question of whether social comparisons are driven by psychological dispositions. To test the empirical validity of this proposition, Gibbons and Buunk (1999) created an instrument ...