Answer to Question #56709 in Microeconomics for Admir

Question

Hello. I read one book and I don't know one economists' term.

Could you explain this economic term: "disutility of labor" in one example from practice?

Thanks and best wishes.

Answer 1

The disutility of work meas:
1) the pain of work itself;
2) the opportunity cost of work time (disutility of work is defined without consideration of work itself);
3) the natural laziness of workers (modern principal-agent theory assumes that workers are effort-averse by nature).
The self-sufficient man who works in economic isolation for the direct satisfaction of his own needs only, stops working at the point at which he begins to value leisure, the absence of labor's disutility, more highly than the increment in satisfaction expected from working more. Having satisfied his most urgent needs, he considers the satisfaction of the still unsatisfied needs less desirable than the satisfaction of his striving after leisure.