The Give and Take on Restaurant Tipping

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).

Name thesis:degree_name

Ph. D.

Level thesis:degree_level

doctoral

Discipline thesis:degree_discipline

Economics

Department dc:contributor.department

Economics

Grantor dc:publisher

Virginia Tech

Year dc:date.issued

2003

Author dc:creator

• Parrett, Matthew Barton

Chairs dc:contributor.committeechair

• Stegeman, Mark
• Eckel, Catherine C.

Committee members dc:contributor.committeemember

• Haller, Hans H.
• McGuirk, Anya M.
• Spanos, Aris

• wage gap
• beauty
• attractiveness
• social norms
• tipping

Statement dc:rights

• In Copyright

Licence dc:rights.uri

• http://rightsstatements.org/vocab/InC/1.0/

Dc Identifier Other

etd-10172003-021146

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:vtechworks.lib.vt.edu:10919/11049