Demonstrating worker quality through strategic absenteeism

William Harbaugh () and Anne van den Nouweland ()
Additional contact information
Anne van den Nouweland: University of Oregon Economics Department

University of Oregon Economics Department Working Papers from University of Oregon Economics Department

Abstract: Determining the productivity of individual workers engaged in team production is difficult. Monitoring expenses may be high, or the observable output of the entire team may be some single product. One way to collect information about individual productivity is to observe how total output changes when the composition of the team changes. While some employers may explicitly shift workers from team to team for exactly this reason, the most common reasons for changes in team composition are at least partly voluntary: vacation time and sick days. In this paper, we develop a model of optimal absenteeism by employees which accounts for strategic interactions between employees. We assume the employer uses both observed changes in output and the strategies of the employees to form beliefs about a given worker’s type. We argue that the model we develop is applicable to a variety of workplace situations where signaling models are not, because it allows a worker’s decisions to provide information about

Keywords: Absenteeism; Non-cooperative Games; Signaling; Teamwork (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C72 J22 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 29
Date: 2002-06-14, Revised 2002-06-14
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-lab
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://economics.uoregon.edu/papers/UO-2002-6_Harbaugh_Strategic_Absenteeism.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: DEMONSTRATING WORKER QUALITY THROUGH STRATEGIC ABSENTEEISM (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:ore:uoecwp:2002-6

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in University of Oregon Economics Department Working Papers from University of Oregon Economics Department Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Bill Harbaugh ().