Arbeitspapier

Screening, Competition, and Job Design: Economic Origins of Good Jobs

In recent decades, many firms offered more discretion to their employees, often increasing the productivity of effort but also leaving more opportunities for shirking. These "high-performance work systems" are difficult to understand in terms of standard moral hazard models. We show experimentally that complementarities between high effort discretion, rent-sharing, screening opportunities, and competition are important driving forces behind these new forms of work organization. We document in particular the endogenous emergence of two fundamentally distinct types of employment strategies. Employers either implement a control strategy, which consists of low effort discretion and little or no rent-sharing, or they implement a trust strategy, which stipulates high effort discretion and substantial rent-sharing. If employers cannot screen employees, the control strategy prevails, while the possibility of screening renders the trust strategy profitable. The introduction of competition substantially fosters the trust strategy, reduces market segmentation, and leads to large welfare gains for both employers and employees.

Language
Englisch

Bibliographic citation
Series: SOEPpapers on Multidisciplinary Panel Data Research ; No. 263

Classification
Wirtschaft
Design of Experiments: Laboratory, Individual
Economics of Contract: Theory
Subject
Job design
high-performance work systems
screening
reputation
competition
trust
control
social preferences
complementarities
SOEP
Arbeitsgestaltung
Kooperative Führung
Leistungsbeurteilung
Vertrauen
Wettbewerb
Reputation
Prinzipal-Agent-Theorie
Soziale Wohlfahrtsfunktion
Test

Event
Geistige Schöpfung
(who)
Bartling, Björn
Fehr, Ernst
Schmidt, Klaus M.
Event
Veröffentlichung
(who)
Deutsches Institut für Wirtschaftsforschung (DIW)
(where)
Berlin
(when)
2010

Handle
Last update
10.03.2025, 11:41 AM CET

Data provider

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Object type

  • Arbeitspapier

Associated

  • Bartling, Björn
  • Fehr, Ernst
  • Schmidt, Klaus M.
  • Deutsches Institut für Wirtschaftsforschung (DIW)

Time of origin

  • 2010

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