Labour Economics - Information Approaches

Information Approaches

In many real-life situations this is far from the case. The firm does not necessarily know how hard a worker is working or how productive they are. This provides an incentive for workers to shirk from providing their full effort — since it is difficult for the employer to identify the hard-working and the shirking employees, there is no incentive to work hard and productivity falls overall, leading to more workers being hired and a lower unemployment rate.

One solution used recently (stock options) grants employees the chance to benefit directly from the firm's success. However, this solution has attracted criticism as executives with large stock option packages have been suspected of acting to over-inflate share values to the detriment of the long-run welfare of the firm. Another solution, foreshadowed by the rise of temporary workers in Japan and the firing of many of these workers in response to the financial crisis of 2008, is more flexible job contracts and terms that encourage employees to work less than full-time by partially compensating for the loss of hours, relying on workers to adapt their working time in response to job requirements and economic conditions instead of the employer trying to determine how much work is needed to complete a given task and overestimating.

Another aspect of uncertainty results from the firm's imperfect knowledge about worker ability. If a firm is unsure about a worker's ability, it pays a wage assuming that the worker's ability is the average of similar workers. This wage undercompenstates high ability workers and may drive them away from the labour market. Such phenomenon is called adverse selection and can sometimes lead to market collapse.

There are many ways to overcome adverse selection in labour market. One important mechanism is called signalling, pioneered by Michael Spence. In his classical paper on job signalling, Spence showed that even if education does not increase productivity, high ability workers may still acquire it just to signal their abilities. Employers can then use education as a signal to infer worker ability and pay higher wages to better educated workers.