The standard cures, and what each one costs
None of the eight is free. Four pay directly in another of the three risks; the rest bill in a currency of their own: cash, build time, content, years of watching. Running several at once without noticing is how the quarter in the opening paragraph happens.
| The cure | Aimed at | What it costs, and where the risk goes |
|---|---|---|
| Individual measurement (commissions, rankings, attribution) | Verification | Prices your best people for the market; the highest performers may become the flight risk (Coff, p. 379, fn. 3) |
| Deliberate opacity, not producing the attribution data | Flight, rent capture | Management flies blind; the verification problem is chosen, not solved (p. 392) |
| Non-compete by contract | Flight | Cash by statute in Germany: at least half of final contractual pay per year of restraint (§ 74 Abs. 2 HGB) |
| Pay rises, counter-offers | Flight | Is rent-sharing by definition: the third risk, arranged voluntarily (p. 381) |
| Firm-specific ties: coworkers, environment, participation | Flight | Cheap to run once in place, per Coff; firm-specific to build, imitable in kind: the contest can move to hiring (pp. 383–385) |
| Embedding the asset in product and process | Flight, verification | Content and tooling production; the person leaves and the asset stays, but rivals can copy the method (p. 385) |
| Observation before trust: up-or-out, promote from within | Verification | Years of watching; mediocrity carried in the meantime (p. 392) |
| Equity and partnership | Flight, alignment | Ownership itself: the residual is shared; a different essay's subject |
Swipe or scroll horizontally if the table is wider than your screen.
Reference & Evidence
Source: Assembled from Coff (1997), Academy of Management Review 22(2), pp. 375–392, and § 74 Abs. 2 HGB. The assembly and the pricing column are the author’s own reading; Coff’s case material is illustrative, not hypothesis-testing, and is priced here as such.
Each line is a claim from the register this journal publishes against, resolved from the register at build time.
- A If productivity is observable the risk reverses, which the paper states in a footnote rather than the body: "Note that if individual productivity is observable (i.e., no information problems), the" problem may be reversed and the highest performers may be at risk for turnover coff-1997-human-assets ·
COFF97-C6 - A Retention is not rent-sharing by definition, and paying to prevent a quit is the second thing rather than the first: one simple "solution is to pay people enough so they will not quit", and although that promotes retention, it also allocates rent and is therefore "considered a rent-sharing strategy" coff-1997-human-assets ·
COFF97-C8 - A Training company embedded content in proprietary materials; exiting presenters stop presenting coff-1997-human-assets ·
COFF97-C12 - A Magazine: up to three years to know if a replacement editor was better coff-1997-human-assets ·
COFF97-C15 - A Firms underinvest in attribution data to keep causal ambiguity coff-1997-human-assets ·
COFF97-C17 - A Firm-specific compensation limits mobility: competitors cannot duplicate it coff-1997-human-assets ·
COFF97-C19 - A Signing bonuses read as reimbursement for lost firm-specific compensation coff-1997-human-assets ·
COFF97-C20
Grades: A, verified against the printed page of the primary source · B, primary source, text layer only · C, authoritative secondary · D, reported.