[littlestymaar]

> Busting a gut to make some shareholders/managers loads of money isn't exactly fair if you aren't also being rewarded.

Exactly. But it's not a matter of “being paid more than the marginal value of the additional work” as microeconomics tend to frame those things.

Symmetrically, people routinely accept pay cut or degraded work conditions when the company isn't going well, even though it makes no sense from a game theory perspective (it's basically a prisoners' dilemma yet people cooperate most of the time).