Anreize zu produktiven und destruktiven Anstrengungen durch relative Entlohnung

Christine Harbring () and Bernd Irlenbusch ()
Additional contact information
Christine Harbring: Universität Bonn
Bernd Irlenbusch: Universität Erfurt

Schmalenbach Journal of Business Research, 2004, vol. 56, issue 6, 546-576

Abstract: Summary If organizations implement incentive systems in which rewards depend on relative rather than on absolute performance, activities are induced from at least two dimensions: (i) productive activities increase the own output of an agent whereas (ii) destructive ones (called sabotage) reduce the output of the competitors. Unfortunately, the sabotage dimension is quite hard to be investigated in real organizations because in general this activity is undesired and therefore strictly forbidden. The present paper aims to fill this gap by an experimental approach which provides clear evidence of the influence of the fraction of winner prizes and the size of the prize difference on both activity dimensions. Contrary to the game-theoretic prediction the productive activity is highest for non-experienced participants in tournaments with a balanced fraction of winner and loser prizes. Moreover, the amount of destructive effort exerted is inefficiently high in relation to the productive effort. This sabotage problem is exacerbated by an increase in the prize difference.

Keywords: C9; D2; J3; M1; Experiments; Incentives; Sabotage; Tournaments; Entlohnung; Experimente; Sabotage; Turniere (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2004
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://link.springer.com/10.1007/BF03372749 Abstract (text/html)

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:spr:sjobre:v:56:y:2004:i:6:d:10.1007_bf03372749

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
https://www.springer.com/journal/41471

DOI: 10.1007/BF03372749

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in Schmalenbach Journal of Business Research from Springer
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().