The shirking model of efficiency wages has been thought to imply that monitoring and pay are substitute instruments for motivating workers. We demonstrate that this result is not generally true. As monitoring becomes cheaper, a given effort level will be implemented with more monitoring and less...

The shirking model of efficiency wages has been thought to imply that monitoring and pay are substitute instruments for motivating workers. We demonstrate that this result hinges critically on restrictive assumptions regarding workers' choice of effort - for example that there are only two...