Turf Wars

Helios Herrera (helios.herrera@hec.ca), Ernesto Reuben and Michael M. Ting (mmt2033@columbia.edu)
Additional contact information
Helios Herrera: HEC Montreal
Michael M. Ting: Columbia University

No 8585, IZA Discussion Papers from Institute of Labor Economics (IZA)

Abstract: Turf wars commonly occur in environments where competition undermines collaboration. We develop a game theoretic model and experimental test of turf wars. The model explores how team production incentives ex post affect team formation decisions ex ante. In the game, one agent decides whether to share jurisdiction over a project with other agents. Agents with jurisdiction decide whether to exert effort and receive a reward based on their relative performance. Hence, sharing can increase joint production but introduces competition for the reward. We find that collaboration has a non-monotonic relationship with both productivity and rewards. The laboratory experiment confirms the model's main predictions. We also explore extensions of the basic model, including one where each agent's productivity is private information.

Keywords: turf war; bureaucracy; jurisdiction; competition; information withholding (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D73 D74 D82 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 62 pages
Date: 2014-10
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cta, nep-exp, nep-hrm and nep-ppm
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Published - published in: Journal of Public Economics, 2017, 152, 143-153

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Journal Article: Turf wars (2017)
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