Monitoring for worker quality: a theory of task assignment, job ladders, wages and mobility in internal labor markets

这项拟议研究的广泛目标是了解信息的性质和获取信息的技术如何影响公司(内部劳动力市场)的工资、晋升路径和任务分配。更狭隘的目标是解释非管理人员内部劳动力市场结构中的一些规律和变化。与许多文献不同的是，采购经理人指数没有关注旨在激励努力工作或阻止道德风险的政策，这可能是一个直觉上不具吸引力的起点，并可能导致与数据不一致的结论。相反，这个项目的重点是监测，以评估工人。基线模型包括两种类型的工人，好的和坏的，以及两种类型的任务，高和低。在这种模式下，大多数工作都是例行公事的(至少对受过适当培训的工人来说是这样)，但工人偶尔会面临“危机”，好工人可以解决，而坏工人则不能。失败很容易被观察到，但成功只有在公司监督工人的情况下才能被观察到。日常工作在“高”任务中效率更高，但失败的代价更高。由于监控成本高昂，公司可以选择三种策略之一。首先，它可以让工人承担很高的任务，并抱着最好的希望。其次，公司可以将工人分配到较低的任务，并对工人进行监督。当危机来临时，它会观察成功和失败，知道工人是好是坏。解决危机的工人将被转移到这项艰巨的任务上。最后，它可以将工人分配给低任务，而不是监视和等待故障。随着时间的推移，没有一次失败，工人成功解决危机的可能性越来越大。这个项目的第一个任务是完成一个带有部分监测、误报和漏报等扩展的最优分配模型，以及考虑多个日益复杂的任务。第二项任务是将模型嵌入劳动力市场和工资决定的更广泛的模型中。这种类型的分析有望使采购经理人指数能够解释非管理性劳动力市场的重要特征。

The broad goal of the proposed research is to understand how the nature of information and the technology for acquiring it affect wages, promotion paths and task-assignment within firms (the internal labor market). The narrower goal is to explain some of the regularities and variation in the structure of internal labor markets for non-managerial workers. In contrast with much of the literature, the PIs do not focus on policies intended to incentivize hard work or discourage moral hazard, which may be an intuitively unappealing starting point and might lead to conclusions that are inconsistent with the data. Instead, this project focuses on monitoring in order to assess workers.The baseline model is one with two types of workers, good and bad, and two types of task, high and low. In this model most work is routine (at least for suitably trained workers), but workers face occasional "crises" which good workers can resolve but bad workers cannot. Failures are readily observed, but successes are only observed if the firm monitors the worker. Routine work is more productive in the "high" task but failures are more costly. Since monitoring is costly, a firm can choose one of three strategies. First, it can place a worker in the high task and hope for the best. Second, the firm can assign the worker to the low task and monitor the worker. When a crisis arrives, it will observe success as well as failure and know whether the worker is good or bad. Workers who resolve the crisis will be moved to the high task. Finally, it can assign the worker to the low task, not monitor and wait for a failure. As time passes without a failure, it becomes increasingly likely that the worker has successfully resolved a crisis. When sufficient time has passed, the firm will assign the worker to the high task.The first task of this project is the completion of an optimal assignment model with extensions such as partial monitoring, false positive and false negatives as well as the consideration of multiple tasks of increasing complexity. The second task is to embed the model in a broader model of the labor market and wage determination.This type of analysis is expected to enable the PIs to explain important features of non-managerial labor markets.