
Asymmetric Information in Wage Negotiations: Hockey’s Natural Experiment (2013) [pdf] - logn
http://economics.usf.edu/PDF/Asymetric%20Information%20Porter%20Kamp.pdf
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lifeisstillgood
tl;dr US Hockey league published its players salaries starting in 1989. Over
next five years, wages rocketed, importance of team negotiating tactics /
prestige vanished and player performance became a major correlation to highest
pay.

In short asymmetric data on employee wages (company knows all salaries,
employee knows just one) leads to inefficent outcomes

Even shorter - everyone's salary and pay should be published - that will fix
pikkety's problem

Even even shorter - how the hell do you measure performance?

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sheldonb
To nitpick, it's the "National Hockey League" (NHL) and has seven Canadian
teams and 23 American teams (likely increasing to 8 and 24 soon).

Publishing of salaries has really created another fun side of the games for
fans. Numbers junkies now have the luxury of advanced on-ice analytics as well
as some cool financial info in the salary cap era.

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Quanticles
Economic inequality is a hot topic right now. Employers knowing everyone's
salaries, but not the employees, puts the employees at a disadvantage when
negotiating salary.

One option would be to require all companies to publish employees salaries.
Would this requirement be more or less onerous than other options?

One argument is that it hurts businesses - but if _every_ business is required
to do it, then it is an even playing field. Obviously that cannot happen in an
international business setting - so would it put the countries that implement
it at a disadvantage, or would the economic gains outweigh the decrease in
competitiveness?

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eldude
Regulation like this would be absurd considering anyone can legally publish
their salary publicly. Salaries are not public because employees want them not
to be public.

I don't want lawmakers or trade unions undermining my right to privacy under
some manipulative power-play guise of "fairness". We are all free to make our
salaries public, if we think it is in our best interest to do so, let's talk
about and focus on that and not be so naive as to believe regulations will
magically solve a cultural issue.

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Teodolfo
In the USA, outside of California and possibly a few other states, it isn't
clear this is legal. Employers may be able to prohibit employees from
publishing their salaries, although they can't prohibit employees from
discussing compensation _with each other._

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eldude
Okay. This is a good data point and where I think we culturally and legally
should be focusing our attention; laws should be passed to expand employee
liberties and ensure the right to disclose wages for a specific class of
employees before considering laws to regulate and encumber businesses.

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SocksCanClose
Shouldn't someone simply build a "log-in-with-LinkedIn" website that allows
people to list their current and former salaries?

