Stakes and Motivation in Tournaments: Playing When There is Nothing to Play for but Pride

Lionel Page and Katie Page
Additional contact information
Katie Page: Department of Psychology, Heythrop College, University of London, England

Economic Analysis and Policy, 2009, vol. 39, issue 3, 445-464

Abstract: Tournaments are an effective means of incentivising participants to ensure an optimal level of effort. However, situations can occur in tournaments where the final outcome of a given competitor does not depend on his/her future performance. Specifically, we study these specific situations in a data set of the group stages of European football club competitions from 1992 to 2009. We identify situations where teams are already sure to finish either first or last at the penultimate stage in the group. We show that such situations affect team performance in the last match, typically decreasing the performance of a team sure to finish first and increasing the performance of a team sure to finish last. The first finding is in line with the economic predictions yet provides interesting implications, namely that the schedule of the match order plays a significant role in the overall performance of the team. The second, counter-intuitive, finding is not well accommodated into the existing economics framework and thus we discuss two alternative explanations, one based on social pressure and the other on pride.

Keywords: doping; economics of sport; illegal activities (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C72 D82 I12 K42 L83 M54 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2009
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (3)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0313592609500392 full text (application/pdf)
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

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:eee:ecanpo:v39:y:2009:i:3:p:445-464

Access Statistics for this article

Economic Analysis and Policy is currently edited by Clevo Wilson

More articles in Economic Analysis and Policy from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().