If the game was fixed and everyone had full information, there isn’t a reason this would happen. But I agree if the promotion/firing is relative or dynamic in

If the game was fixed and everyone had full information, there isn’t a reason this would happen. But I agree if the promotion/firing is relative or dynamic in some way, then you’d race down to arbitrarily low effort. The real problem is correlating work with value in an unbiased way. If you had perfect information on the value of each worker, I can’t see how it would be complicated to do a cost/benefit analysis. But without reading/predicting the future you can’t usually figure out value because an unfinished product has no current value and a finished/legacy product has fixed value. In either case the worker has no marginal value.