 The effect of losing and winning on cheating and effort in repeated competitionsSarah Necker and Fabian Paetzel Journal of Economic Psychology, 2023, vol. 98, issue C Abstract: Competitive rewards are often assigned on a regular basis, e.g., in annual salary negotiations or employee-of-the-month schemes. The repetition of competitions can imply that opponents are matched based on earlier outcomes. Using a real-effort experiment, we examine how cheating and effort evolve in two rounds of competitions in which subjects compete with different types of opponents in the second round (random/based on the first-round outcome). We find that (i) losing causes competitors to increase cheating in the second round while winning implies a tendency to reduce cheating. A similar effect is found with regard to effort, as losers increase effort to a larger extent than winners. (ii) Competitor matching does not significantly affect behavior. Keywords: Cheating; Effort; Competition; Competitor; Social recognition; Laboratory experiment (search for similar items in EconPapers) Downloads: (external link) Related works: Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:joepsy:v:98:y:2023:i:c:s0167487023000569 DOI: 10.1016/j.joep.2023.102655 Access Statistics for this article Journal of Economic Psychology is currently edited by G. Antonides and D. Read More articles in Journal of Economic Psychology from Elsevier |
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