Commissions are a good example.

They are deeply "unfair", using the logic of objections to the original article.

The issue isn’t that the employer measures and rewards work output, which is not controversial itself (although some _methods_ of measuring are).

The issue is that they use everything they know about you to determine the lowest possible price you’re willing to accept, on an individual basis with droves of data that exist because of as-tech.

I never took a college-level economics course, but a book I read purporting to be an intro to economic thinking put it something like this (no warranty I'm remembering correctly):

If people freely trade something, in an ideal, spherical cow way, then they should both be better off afterwards. Therefore the trade (including trading labor as well as goods) creates value. I think this was called "surplus" value.

However, there is generally more than one price where both parties would benefit and should want to trade. Which price is agreed on in that range determines who gets what portion of the surplus value.

Therefore if one side of the transaction has superior knowledge of what price the other side will accept, then in theory they could get up to 99.99...% of the surplus value, as long as the other party "rationally" will be motivated by the remaining 0.00...1%.

A purely rational actor with no secrets is easily manipulated.

> If people freely trade something, in an ideal, spherical cow way, then they should both be better off afterwards. Therefore the trade (including trading labor as well as goods) creates value. I think this was called "surplus" value.

What you're describing is basically the "Subjective theory of value"[1].

> Therefore if one side of the transaction has superior knowledge of what price the other side will accept, then in theory they could get up to 99.99...% of the surplus value, as long as the other party "rationally" will be motivated by the remaining 0.00...1%.

Interestingly people don't really act like that[2].

> A purely rational actor with no secrets is easily manipulated.

Probably. Good thing that, in this case, the most important information like competing offers tends to be secret. Or at least strategically revealed.

---

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subjective_theory_of_value

2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ultimatum_game

Productivity in sales is easy to measure though. You either get the sale or you don't. Productivity is software engineering is a lot harder to quantify and many people who think they are good at it simply aren't.

You don't have to look any further than the deceit, sabotage, and selfishness that show up whenever commissions impact the financial status of the salespeople to see their downside.

I am not sure you read the article. For commissions to be relevant, the AI software would have to determine your commission and since it is intransparent it could decide to give some well performing employees less money because that motivates them to work harder as the AI has determined that this particular employee really needs the money for whatever reason.