It's very difficult to know the output of an individual, but often straightforward to measure the output of a team. If a team creates some complete mobile app,

It's very difficult to know the output of an individual, but often straightforward to measure the output of a team. If a team creates some complete mobile app, you can know exactly how much it cost, and roughly how high quality it is. The most successful outsourcing group I worked with was in India. I did some math at the time and estimated that overall, they were about as productive as the US per dollar spent. That hints that the market roughly optimized correctly. Of course, there was a huge diversity of productivity between individuals in both groups, but the management had no real idea how to evaluate that (if they had, they would have paid people quite different amounts).