Econ Papers Daily / 期刊论文
大池塘里的大鱼：职场中的位置嫉妒
Big fish in a bigger pond: positional envy in the workplace
摘要
In an agency model with hidden information, we examine how skill heterogeneity can affect the design of optimal contracts and the distribution of rents across workers. We first consider a standard model with two worker types, and show that under certain conditions, the information rent accruing to high‐ability workers can be non‐monotonic, first increasing and then decreasing in the ability gap. We then introduce other‐regarding preferences, and assume that workers can incur a utility loss from envy, due to unfavourable contract rent comparisons. We show that in this extended framework, where high‐ability workers also obtain an envy rent from their contracts, the ability gap that maximizes their payoff is decreasing in the intensity of envy, meaning that they tend to prefer less skill heterogeneity in the workplace. Finally, we show that from the principal's perspective, separating contracts dominate both pooling and screening contracts where low‐ability workers are driven out of the market. This result applies to the standard hidden‐information problem, and also extends to the framework with other‐regarding preferences, even though envy raises the cost of separation.
中文摘要
在隐藏信息的代理模型中，我们考察技能异质性如何影响最优契约的设计以及租金在工人之间的分配。我们首先考虑一个包含两类工人的标准模型，并表明在一定条件下，高能力工人所获得的信息租金可能非单调变化，即随着能力差距先增后减。随后我们引入涉他偏好，并假设工人可能因不利的契约租金比较而承受嫉妒带来的效用损失。我们表明，在这一扩展框架中，高能力工人也会从其契约中获得嫉妒租金，使其收益最大化的能力差距随嫉妒强度递减，这意味着他们倾向于偏好工作场所中更小的技能异质性。最后，我们表明从委托人的角度看，分离契约优于混同契约和将低能力工人挤出市场的筛选契约。这一结果适用于标准的隐藏信息问题，并且也扩展到具有涉他偏好的框架，尽管嫉妒会提高分离的成本。