Strategic Interaction


Our approach employs game theory, the analysis of strategic interaction. Surveillance technologies directly change the ways people interact; they are, in this sense, interpersonal technologies. (Contrast technologies that change the environment and affect human interaction only indirectly.) In the usual case, the purpose in using surveillance is to alter interaction strategically. That is, the employer monitors computer use, predicting that employees will behave differently because of what the employer may find out. To achieve this kind of effect, the employees need to know about the surveillance. This explains why, ethics aside, so many surveillance devices declare themselves . (But some do not. While covert surveillance is certainly possible, and gets cheaper, we will treat it as a special case later.)

Therefore, we will analyze workplace surveillance as strategic interaction. This will allow us to develop an ethical analysis in terms of choices agents make between technologically structured alternatives. We emphasize choices of employees, as well as employers , and suggest that some informal game theory is useful to explore the structure of their interactions. For example, in our analysis, whether a particular surveillance technology is used cooperatively is not solely determined by the technology itself. An employee can see a particular surveillance technology as protection from harassment or as an invasion of privacy. We analyze this ambivalent situation as the General Surveillance Game next .

Our approach to ethics and technology issues begins with an elementary game theoretic analysis. We attempt abstractly to characterize a technology in terms of the alternative actions (strategies) it facilitates and various agents values (preferences) over the resulting outcomes . Hopefully, the results are some simple models that capture some of the ethically salient features of the situation structured by the technology. Game theory may strike some readers as an inappropriate tool for ethical analysis. While this is not the place for a full discussion of the relation of these two fields (Binmore, 2004), we should briefly speak to two misapprehensions. First, game theory need not assume that agents are amoral or selfish; agents with values that include others also have strategy problems amenable to game theoretic analysis. Second, game theory is seen as depending on the empirically false assumption that people are super-rational calculators . Fortunately, recent work showing that rational choice and evolutionary branches of game theory converge allows us to avoid overrationalizing agent motivation (Danielson, 2004).




Electronic Monitoring in the Workplace. Controversies and Solutions
Electronic Monitoring in the Workplace: Controversies and Solutions
ISBN: 1591404568
EAN: 2147483647
Year: 2005
Pages: 161

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