Amazon Will Pay You $5,000 to Quit Your Job

I wonder where do they apply this policy? There are plenty of sob stories of sweatshops in Germany (for instance).

If this is a global policy then the argument that they're the scum of the Earth with regard to employees cannot hold much water.

The first (and stated) effect of this policy is to weed out the unmotivated employees.

However, Dan Ariely has explained that the secondary effect is potentially more powerful. For those that choose to stay, they will forever live with their past action of having turned down lots of money to work there. So, when they're having a crappy day and hating their job, they're probably thinking "why didn't I take the money and quit?!". The only way to reconcile their thoughts and actions is to explain that, in fact, they must really love this job and therefore should work hard at it. This effect is known as ‘Cognitive Dissonance’[1] and is fascinating.

Here's a link to a video of Dan explaining this[2] and a really excellent Coursera course he does on Irrational behaviour[3].

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cognitive_dissonance

[2] http://bigthink.com/videos/dan-ariely-zappos-and-the-offer

[3] https://www.coursera.org/course/behavioralecon

Zappos pays you $2,000 to quit... during the recruiting process

http://www.businessweek.com/stories/2008-09-16/why-zappos-of...

Big defense contractors have a yearly VRIF (Voluntary Reduction In Force), which is when they offer slightly better than average retirement packages to expendable older employees. Young people would never get the offer (because they couldn't retire) and important older engineers would also never get the offer, even though many of them wanted it. This is a big improvement over that since it can be used by younger employees and the employee decides unilaterally if they want the package.

The mechanism at work might be https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sunk_costs