CeDEx Brown Bag Seminar - Joseph McDonnell

Title: Somebody’s Watching Me: A Real-Effort Gift-Exchange Game With Monitoring

Abstract: Advances in surveillance technology and changes in the nature of work have transformed monitoring from simple output checks to more intrusive observation of workers’ actions, such as keystroke logging and real-time screen observation. Although such practices are increasingly prevalent in contemporary workplaces, there is limited experimental evidence on how they affect productivity and reciprocity when contracts are incomplete. I present a real-effort gift-exchange experiment that varies the intensity and source of monitoring, alongside the level of noise in the effort–output relationship. The design enables the investigation of both the direct impact of monitoring on behaviour and the extent to which its effects vary with context.