[lmm]

>I don't think wages affect honesty to any great extent, no. I think bad working conditions affect honesty a lot more.

Sure, but the two are closely correlated.

>do you ask the hotel how much they pay their cleaning staff, and choose the one with higher base pay? How much more are you willing to pay to be in a hotel which pays their employees a higher wage?

I'd be surprised if they handed that information out, and it's not worth a great deal of research. But if I do happen to know then it changes how much I'm willing to pay for a given hotel, yes. I haven't calculated every facet of my internal hotel-pricing model (and it's almost certainly nonoptimal in some way - just not worth the effort to optimize), but I've certainly been known to pay more for a hotel I had a better impression of that, and on the (IIRC unique) occasion when I happened to know what the cleaners at one were paid I'm pretty sure that was one of the factors.

[dalke]

If people started asking, and making decisions based on that knowledge, then perhaps salaries and working conditions would improve for the cleaners. But you are right, people (including myself) use other proxies instead.