IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/nbr/nberwo/35309.html

But I Like Doing This! Enjoyable Tasks, Contracting, and Automation

Author

Listed:
  • Joshua S. Gans

Abstract

Workers sometimes enjoy productive tasks and voluntarily devote unpaid time to them. We study O-ring jobs in which firms can either price a complete task bundle or specify paid task floors while workers remain free to add time. For any allocation supported by both hourly contracts, the wage bill is identical: voluntary top-up is not a discount. The contracts differ because paid floors cannot cap attractive tasks below the worker's voluntary supply. This implementability constraint adds a containment motive for automation alongside replacement and scale effects. It also makes payroll measures incomplete: conditional on a common automated set and a common AI technology, jobs with the same payroll footprint can differ in worked time and task mix. Rich salaried bundle pricing removes the hourly-contract distortion.

Suggested Citation

  • Joshua S. Gans, 2026. "But I Like Doing This! Enjoyable Tasks, Contracting, and Automation," NBER Working Papers 35309, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
    • Handle: RePEc:nbr:nberwo:35309
    Note: PR
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://www.nber.org/papers/w35309.pdf
    Download Restriction: Access to the full text is generally limited to series subscribers, however if the top level domain of the client browser is in a developing country or transition economy free access is provided. More information about subscriptions and free access is available at http://www.nber.org/wwphelp.html. Free access is also available to older working papers.
    ---><---

    As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to

    for a different version of it.

    More about this item

    JEL classification:

    • J22 - Labor and Demographic Economics - - Demand and Supply of Labor - - - Time Allocation and Labor Supply
    • J24 - Labor and Demographic Economics - - Demand and Supply of Labor - - - Human Capital; Skills; Occupational Choice; Labor Productivity
    • J31 - Labor and Demographic Economics - - Wages, Compensation, and Labor Costs - - - Wage Level and Structure; Wage Differentials
    • J33 - Labor and Demographic Economics - - Wages, Compensation, and Labor Costs - - - Compensation Packages; Payment Methods
    • O33 - Economic Development, Innovation, Technological Change, and Growth - - Innovation; Research and Development; Technological Change; Intellectual Property Rights - - - Technological Change: Choices and Consequences; Diffusion Processes

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:nbr:nberwo:35309. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: the person in charge (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/nberrus.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.