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Browsing by Author "Parrett, Matthew Barton"

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    The Give and Take on Restaurant Tipping
    Parrett, Matthew Barton (Virginia Tech, 2003-09-17)
    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).