The Minimum Wage as an Anchor: Effects on Determinations of Fairness by Humans and AI

I study the role of the minimum wage as an anchor for perceptions of the fairness of wages by both human subjects and AI. Through surveys on human subjects enrolled in the crowdsourcing platform Prolific.co and queries submitted to the large language model GPT-3, I test whether the numerical response for what wage is deemed fair for a particular job description changes when respondents and GPT-3 are prompted with information regarding the minimum wage. I find that the minimum wage influences the distribution of responses for the wage considered fair by shifting the mean towards the minimum wage, thus establishing the minimum wage's role as an anchor for judgements of fairness. The anchor exerts a similar effect on the AI bot, but with differences including a systematic shift downward of the wage perceived as fair. In addition, I test the AI bot for variability with respect to gender and race cues in the prompt and find anomalies in the distribution of responses.