American Economic Review
ISSN 0002-8282 (Print) | ISSN 1944-7981 (Online)
Monitoring, Motivation, and Management: The Determinants of Opportunistic Behavior in a Field Experiment
American Economic Review
vol. 92,
no. 4, September 2002
(pp. 850–873)
Abstract
Economic models of incentives in employment relationships are based on a specific theory of motivation: employees are "rational cheaters," who anticipate the consequences of their actions and shirk when the marginal benefits exceed costs. We investigate the "rational cheater model" by observing how experimentally induced variation in monitoring of telephone call center employees influences opportunism. A significant fraction of employees behave as the "rational cheater model" predicts. A substantial proportion of employees, however, do not respond to manipulations in the monitoring rate. This heterogeneity is related to variation in employee assessments of their general treatment by the employer. (JEL D2, J2, L2, L8, M12)Citation
Nagin, Daniel, S., James B. Rebitzer, Seth Sanders, and Lowell J. Taylor. 2002. "Monitoring, Motivation, and Management: The Determinants of Opportunistic Behavior in a Field Experiment ." American Economic Review, 92 (4): 850–873. DOI: 10.1257/00028280260344498JEL Classification
- M54 Personnel Economics: Labor Management
- D82 Asymmetric and Private Information; Mechanism Design
- J33 Compensation Packages; Payment Methods
- J53 Labor-Management Relations; Industrial Jurisprudence
- M12 Personnel Management; Executives; Executive Compensation
- M52 Personnel Economics: Compensation and Compensation Methods and Their Effects