Tournament Incentives in the Field: Gender Differences in the Workplace

By Josse Delfgaauw, Robert Dur, Joeri Sol, Willem J. M. I. Verbeke. Journal of Labor Economics, 2013

192 citations recorded by the source corpus.

We ran a field experiment in a Dutch retail chain consisting of 128 stores. In a random sample of these stores, we introduced short-term sales competitions among subsets of stores. We find that sales competitions have a large effect on sales growth, but only in stores where the store’s manager and a sufficiently large fraction of the employees have the same gender. Remarkably, results are alike for sales competitions with and without monetary rewards, suggesting a high symbolic value of winning a tournament.

Subfields: Economics and Econometrics, General Decision Sciences, Safety Research

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/6ef203f8b449fe0ed2f89b3660c15839e81a87c2

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Economics and Econometrics

In General Decision Sciences

In Safety Research

Citations in the corpus

Employee Recognition and Performance: A Field Experiment (2016, background): “First, we contribute to a substantial body of evidence in the business and psychology literature on the power of employee recognition, in particular Stajkovic and Luthans (2003) and Grant and Gino (2010). A unique feature of our study is that we exogenously vary the scarcity of recognition, ranging ”
Gender and the Labor Market: What Have We Learned from Field and Lab Experiments? (2014, background): “Similar conclusions have been drawn from (scant) survey and field evidence (Dohmen et al., 2011; Dwyer et al., 2011). High-profile careers often develop in highly competitive settings, in which rewards are linked to relative, rather than absolute, performance. Using experiments that ask subjects to ”
Tournaments Without Prizes: Evidence from Personnel Records (2011, background): “In a context where workers are compensated according to team performance, Delfgaauw et al. (2009) find that information on relative performance leads to higher productivity, while Bandiera et al. (2009) find the opposite.”
Team Incentives: Evidence from a Firm Level Experiment (2013, unknown): “3 Theory highlights how rank incentives can affect productivity if individuals have status concerns (Moldovanu, Sela, and Shi, 2007; Besley and Ghatak, 2008), and a small empirical literature shows that providing information on rankings without prizes impacts productivity when individuals work indep”
A survey of experimental research on contests, all-pay auctions and tournaments (2014, background): “Delfgaauw et al. (2013) find that tournament incentives have a significant effect on sales performance.”
Rankings and Risk-Taking in the Finance Industry (2018, unknown): “Recent evidence from laboratory and field experiments documents that rank incentives, on average, increase individuals’ effort and performance (Azmat and Iriberri, 2010; Blanes-i-Vidal and Nossol, 2011; Tran and Zeckhauser, 2012; Bandiera et al., 2013; Delfgaauw et al., 2013), but also promote uneth”
Team Incentives and Performance: Evidence from a Retail Chain (2015, unknown): “, 2014), on relative performance evaluation between individuals (Barankay, 2012) and between teams (Delfgaauw et al., 2013), and lab experiments on incentives (Nalbantian and Schotter, 1997).”