Workplace surveillance, privacy protection, and efficiency wages

Patrick Schmitz

No 25/2005, Bonn Econ Discussion Papers from University of Bonn, Bonn Graduate School of Economics (BGSE)

Abstract: Consider an employer who wants her employee to work hard. As is well known from the e.ciency wage literature, the employer must pay the (wealth-constrained) employee a positive rent to provide incentives for exerting unobservable e.ort. Alternatively, the employer could make effort observable by costly workplace surveillance. It is argued that a privacy protection law preventing surveillance may increase the total surplus. While such a law reduces the employer’s profit, this loss can be overcompensated by the employee’s gain, because the employer invests in surveillance not only to implement higher effort, but also to reduce the employee’s rent.

Keywords: Privacy protection laws; workplace surveillance; moral hazard (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: J83 K31 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2005
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (23)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.econstor.eu/bitstream/10419/22931/1/bgse25_2005.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: Workplace surveillance, privacy protection, and efficiency wages (2005)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:zbw:bonedp:252005

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Bonn Econ Discussion Papers from University of Bonn, Bonn Graduate School of Economics (BGSE) Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ZBW - Leibniz Information Centre for Economics ().