When I asked Amazon about these workers’ complaints, the company said that the top priority of its fulfillment centers is the success and well-being of its employees. No worker is ever dismissed without good reason, Robinson told me. And as the company grows, she added, it is “strongly in our interests” to retain existing employees. But that just makes The Offer seem more puzzling. If Amazon wants to retain employees, why would it pay them to leave?

With The Offer, Amazon seems to be making the calculation that weeding out a single unengaged worker is worth as much as multiple thousands of dollars. But there might be other, less obvious effects of providing The Offer that serve to benefit Amazon, according to some behavioral economists. The Offer might in fact be a way to make employees stay longer than they otherwise might.

The reasoning goes like this: Employees resist an initial temptation—to quit Amazon and walk out with cash—and by resisting it, they may actually feel more committed to their jobs, said Ian Ayres, a professor at Yale Law School who wrote about the concept of The Offer in his book Carrots and Sticks: Unlock the Power of Incentives to Get Things Done. Amazon employees who evaluate The Offer and then turn it down have decided they like the company enough to stay a little longer. They then want their future behavior to match that feeling, Ayres said.

When I talked to Katherine Milkman, a professor at the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania, she brought up a similar idea, from the realm of social psychology. She talked about the mental pressure humans feel to resolve cognitive dissonance—if people have two conflicting beliefs, they’ll try to rationalize one to make it fit with the other. In this case, workers may dislike their jobs at Amazon, but if they turn down The Offer, it means they passed on a chance to quit. It’s likely that they’ll then try to convince themselves that they actually like working at Amazon, Milkman said. To pick a more extreme example of this phenomenon, when people join a cult that says the world is going to end on a certain date and then it doesn't end, they tend to end up believing more strongly in the cult, because they can’t put up with the cognitive dissonance between what they believe and what actually happened.

Milkman also brought up “escalation of commitment,” another concept studied by behavioral economists. The idea is that when people put a lot of money or effort into something and it appears to be going badly—perhaps they bought a stock and the share price is tanking—they often double down on their commitment. “They say, ‘I want to see this turn around—I don’t want it to turn out badly,’” Milkman said. When employees see that they’ve lost $5,000 by not taking The Offer, they might mentally recommit to the company, trying to do better at their jobs and enjoy them more.