The Give and Take on Restaurant Tipping

• Main Author: Parrett, Matthew Barton
• Other Authors: Economics
• Format: Others
• Published: Virginia Tech 2011
• Subjects: wage gap; beauty; attractiveness; social norms; tipping
• Online Access: http://hdl.handle.net/10919/11049; http://scholar.lib.vt.edu/theses/available/etd-10172003-021146

This dissertation examines aspects of both the consumer (the "give") and the server (the "take") sides of restaurant tipping. On the consumer side, I address both why, and how much, people tip in restaurants. I also examine a policy issue related to the recent Supreme Court decision in United States v. Fior d'Italia. These issues are addressed via a combination of theoretical, empirical, and experimental analysis. On the server side, I use survey data collected from several restaurants to address the issue of labor market discrimination based on beauty. Specifically, do more attractive servers earn higher tips than less attractive servers? I argue that a tipping data set offers several advantages over data sets used in previous studies of the beauty wage gap. This dissertation was funded by a National Science Foundation Dissertation Enhancement Grant (NSF #427347). === Ph. D.