Shattering the Illusion of the Self-Earned Tip: The Effect of a Restaurant Magician on Co-Workers’ Tips

Abstract

During a service experience, consumers often encounter numerous workers seeking tips. For example, restaurant customers may face implicit tip requests from a parking valet, lounge musician, bartender, hostess, sommelier, waiter, and/or busboy. This raises questions about how the tips given to one worker depend on the performances of their co-workers and/or on the tip amounts previously given to those co-workers. The answers to these questions have implications about the role of affective, self-perception, licensing, and resource budgeting processes in tipping, about the fairness of different tip distribution schemes, and about decisions regarding how many different service workers managers should allow to accept tips. This paper empirically examines these questions for the first time in two natural field experiments conducted by a restaurant magician. Data indicated that: (i) servers got larger tips when the magician performed at their customers’ tables, and (ii) the magician (but not the servers) got substantially more in tips when he gave customers a souvenir card. The latter findings imply that the size of tips customers gave the magician had no impact on the size of tips they gave their server. The theoretical and practical implications of these findings are discussed along with directions for future research.