Tournaments and Office Politics: Evidence from a Real Effort Experiment
By Jeffrey P. Carpenter, Peter Hans Matthews, Johannes Schirm. Social Science Research Network, 2010
195 citations recorded by the source corpus.
In many environments, tournaments can elicit more effort from workers, except perhaps when workers can sabotage each other. Because it is hard to separate effort, ability and output in many real workplace settings, the empirical evidence on the incentive effect of tournaments is thin. There is even less evidence on the impact of sabotage because real world acts of sabotage are often subtle manifestations of subjective peer evaluation or "office politics." We discuss a real effort experiment in which effort, quality adjusted output and office politics are compared under piece rates and tournaments. Our results suggest that tournaments increase effort only in the absence of office politics. Competitors are more likely to sabotage each other in tournaments and, as a result, workers actually provide less effort simply because they expect to be the victims of sabotage. Adjusting output for quality with the rating of an independent auditor shrinks the incentive effect of the tournament even further since output tends to become more slipshod.
Subfields: Economics and Econometrics, Safety Research
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/b7a2402545227dd6369bdb8b441f9883a42bed17
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Citations in the corpus
- A survey of experimental research on contests, all-pay auctions and tournaments (2014, background): “As noted by Carpenter et al. (2010), despite the importance of sabotage to the efficiency properties of tournaments, relatively little experimental work has been devoted to it.”
- Sabotage in Tournaments: Evidence from a Natural Experiment (2012, unknown): “Sabotage is therefore typically welfare damaging, either in a direct way by reducing output or performance of competitors or indirectly if it reduces the agents’ incentives to exert productive effort (Konrad, 2000; Carpenter et al., 2010; Harbring and Irlenbusch, 2011). While it seems obvious that s”
- A Structural Analysis of Disappointment Aversion in a Real Effort Competition (2012, unknown): “Recently experiments involving real effort tournaments have become popular (e.g., van Dijk et al., 2001; Gneezy et al., 2003; Niederle and Vesterlund, 2007; Carpenter et al., 2007; Charness and Villeval, 2009).”
- Target Setting in Tournaments: Theory and Evidence from China (2018, unknown): “See Ehrenberg and Bognanno (1990); Levitt (1994); Eriksson (1999); Guryan et al. (2009); Carpenter et al.”