Article ID Journal Published Year Pages File Type
885409 Journal of Economic Psychology 2009 11 Pages PDF
Abstract

Evidence on effort-demanding tasks suggests that exerting effort is fatiguing and that the accumulation of fatigue negatively affects the performance on both simultaneous and sequential tasks. This paper introduces the notion of fatigue by assuming that a worker has a limited amount of renewable resources that are depleted when effort is exerted. As multiple equilibria and thresholds can emerge, the optimal intertemporal allocation of effort depends both on the fatigue accumulated by the worker and on the wage rate chosen by the firm. A principal should take this into account, because choosing a wage rate that equals the marginal product value is, in general, suboptimal. This holds even if the worker is expected to exert constant effort over time.

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