Preferences for work arrangements: A discrete choice experiment

Abstract

This study investigates individual preferences for work arrangements in a discrete choice experiment. Based on sociological and economic literature, we identified six essential job attributes-earnings, job security, training opportunities, scheduling flexibility, prestige of the company, and gender composition of the work team-and mapped these into hypothetical job offers. Out of three job offers, with different specifications in the respective job attributes, respondents had to choose the offer they considered as most attractive. In 2017, we implemented our choice experiment in two large-scale surveys conducted in two countries: Germany (N = 2,659) and the Netherlands (N = 2,678). Our analyses revealed that respondents considered all six job attributes in their decision process but had different priorities for each. Moreover, we found gendered preferences. Women preferred scheduling flexibility and a company with a good reputation, whereas men preferred jobs with high earnings and a permanent contract. Despite different national labor market regulations, different target populations, and different sampling strategies for the two surveys, job preferences for German and Dutch respondents were largely parallel.