When Dan Price announced last week that he would cut his own pay and profits to make it possible to raise the minimum wage at Gravity Payments, his credit card processing company in Seattle, to a hefty $70,000 a year, he had little idea of the whirlwind it would stir.

While the overwhelming majority of the responses on social media and elsewhere were positive — punctuated with labels like “hero” and hand-clapping emojis — there were also a number of skeptics and naysayers.

Sandi Krakowski, an author and Facebook marketing expert, posted on Twitter: “His mind-set will hurt everyone in the end. He’s young. He has a good intent, but wrong method.”

Patrick R. Rogers, an associate professor of strategic management at the School of Business and Economics at North Carolina A&T State University, wrote in an email: “The sad thing is that Mr. Price probably thinks happy workers are productive workers. However, there’s just no evidence that this is true. So he’ll improve happiness, only in the short term, and will not improve productivity. Which doesn’t bode well for his long-term viability as a firm.”