How Many Winners are Good to Have? On Tournaments with Sabotage

By C. Harbring, Bernd Irlenbusch. Social Science Research Network, 2008

174 citations recorded by the source corpus.

From an employer's perspective, a tournament should induce agents to exert productive activities but refrain from destructive ones. We experimentally test the predictive power of a tournament model which suggests that (within a reasonable framework) productive and destructive activities are influenced neither by the number of agents taking part in the tournament nor by the fraction of the winner prizes. Our results clearly confirm that sabotage in tournaments indeed occurs. While tournament size has virtually no effect on behavior, a balanced fraction of winner and loser prizes appears to enhance productive activities.

Subfields: Demography, Management Science and Operations Research, Safety Research

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/c646689cd34cba77dbe8db0d5e0ee139b2798af3

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Citations in the corpus

Tournaments and Office Politics: Evidence from a Real Effort Experiment (2010, background): “The principal contributors to this small literature have been Harbring and Irlenbusch (2003a, 2003b, 2005) and Falk and Fehr (2002), who have considered the effects of variations in the number of competitors, the number of prizes, the prize spread, the contract choices available to principals and…”
The Dark Side of Competition for Status (2014, background): “…with whom he is competing through means of sabotage (Lazear, 1989; Garicano and Palacios-Huerta, 2006; Harbring et al., 2007; Falk et al., 2008; Harbring and Irlenbusch, 2008; Carpenter et al., 2010; Abbink and Hermann, 2011; Balafoutas et al., 2012).2 Similarly, workers may also cheat to…”
A survey of experimental research on contests, all-pay auctions and tournaments (2014, background): “Harbring and Irlenbusch (2005, 2008, 2011) and Harbring et al. (2007) have provided a large share of the findings in this area.”
Sabotage in Tournaments: Evidence from a Natural Experiment (2012, unknown): “Several experiments have found that sabotage increases with the prize spread in a tournament (Harbring and Irlenbusch, 2005, 2008, 2011; Falk et al., 2008) and that sabotage has disincentive effects on tournament participants (Carpenter et al., 2011).”
Entry into Winner-Take-All and Proportional-Prize Contests: An Experimental Study (2010, background): “…in effort by players (Bull et al., 1987; Nalbantian and Schotter, 1997; Eriksson et al., 2009) or sabotage among them (Munster, 2007; Chen, 2003; Harbring and Irlenbusch, 2008), and the outcomes are also affected by heterogeneity among players (Schotter and Weigelt, 1992; Harbring et al., 2007)…”
Sabotage in contests: a survey (2015, background): “Harbring and Irlenbusch (2008) found that tournament size does not affect sabotage activity.”