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American Economic Review Vol. 92 No. 4 2002

Monitoring, Motivation, and Management: The Determinants of Opportunistic Behavior in a Field Experiment

Daniel S. Nagin1; James B. Rebitzer2; Seth Sanders3; Lowell J. Taylor4

1 H. John Heinz III School of Public Policy and Management, Carnegie Mellon University, 5000 Forbes Avenue, Pittsburgh, PA 15213. · 2 Weatherhead School of Management, Case Western Reserve University, 10900 Euclid Avenue, Cleveland, OH 44106, National Bureau of Economic Research, and The Jerome Levy Institute. · 3 Department of Economics, 3105 Tydings Hall, University of Maryland, College Park, MD 20742. · 4 H. John Heinz III School of Public Policy and Management, Carnegie Mellon University.

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.

DOI
10.1257/00028280260344498
Volume
92
Issue
4
Pages
850-873
Language
en
Sources
openalex crossref bibtex:phds-export.bib

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