The Dark Side of Competition for Status (preprint)

Gary Charness, David Masclet () and Marie Claire Villeval

Working Papers from HAL

Abstract: Unethical behavior within organizations is not rare. We investigate experimentally the role of status-seeking behavior in sabotage and cheating activities aiming at improving one's performance ranking in a flat-wage environment. We find that average effort is higher when individuals are informed about their relative performance. However, ranking feedback also favors disreputable behavior. Some individuals do not hesitate to incur a cost to improve their rank by sabotaging others' work or by increasing artificially their own performance. Introducing sabotage opportunities has a strong detrimental effect on performance. Therefore, ranking incentives should be used with care. Inducing group identity discourages sabotage among peers but increases in-group rivalry.

Keywords: doping; sabotage; feedback; Status; ranking; competitive preferences; experiment (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2014-12-03
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-exp and nep-hrm
Note: View the original document on HAL open archive server: https://shs.hal.science/halshs-01090241v1
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (132)

Downloads: (external link)
https://shs.hal.science/halshs-01090241v1/document (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:hal:wpaper:halshs-01090241

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Working Papers from HAL
Bibliographic data for series maintained by CCSD ().