Signaling and Screening of Workers' Motivation

By Josse Delfgaauw, Robert Dur. Social Science Research Network, 2007

304 citations recorded by the source corpus.

This paper develops a model in which workers are heterogeneous in their intrinsic motivation to work at a firm. We characterise optimal incentive schemes and examine how the firm can attract and select highly motivated workers to fill a vacancy when workers’ motivation is private information. While posting a higher wage increases the probability of filling the vacancy, it decreases the expected average quality of job applicants because less motivated workers are induced to apply. The optimal wage scheme entails a trade-off between the probability of filling the vacancy, the rents left to the worker, and the expected worker's motivation. This discussion paper has resulted in a publication in the Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization , 62(4), 605-24.

Subfields: Economics and Econometrics, Safety Research

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/52c0541128680f59ad4921283872b8c49f4a07ee

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Citations in the corpus

Who Becomes a Politician (2017, unknown): “This model of the supply side is related to those in Delfgaauw and Dur (2007), Francois (2000) and Dal Bó, Finan, and Rossi (2013), but among other differences it considers the distinct case of “leisure” politicians who do not give up immediate private sector earnings when entering public service.”
Managerial Talent, Motivation, and Self-Selection into Public Management (2008, background): “Typically, papers in this literature have either a moral-hazard framework (such as Besley and Ghatak, 2005; Francois, 2000) or an adverse-selection framework (Handy and Katz, 1998; Delfgaauw and Dur, 2007, 2008a), or both (Francois, 2007; Prendergast, 2007).”
Chapter 6 – The Personnel Economics of the Developing State (2017, background): “But as a small theoretical literature in economics [e.g., Delfgaauw and Dur (2007), Francois (2000), and Prendergast (2007)] has pointed out, offering higher wages may come at the cost of attracting individuals who are more corruptible or care less about the mission.”
The Importance of Being Emotional : How do Emotions Affect Entrepreneurial Opportunity Evaluation and Exploitation? (2010, background): “Researchers following the notion of new institutional economics have started to extend the basic model by assuming bounded rationality (Dequech, 2006; Casson, 2005; Shane, 2000, 2003; Delfgaauw and Dur, 2007) and behavioral scholars are now broadening the model by incorporating robust psychological ”