The market for talent: Competition for resources and self-governance in teams

Abhijit Ramalingam, Brock Stoddard and James Walker

Games and Economic Behavior, 2019, vol. 114, issue C, 268-284

Abstract: In a laboratory setting, we investigate the effect of competition for the resources of team members with ‘divided loyalties’, and the role of such competition in overcoming the free-rider problem associated with the provision of team-level public goods. We find that competition alone creates ‘winners’ and ‘losers’. However, if groups have access to more information on the actions of team members, or are able to determine their membership through ostracism, they are more successful in attracting the ‘loyalties’ of team members. By eschewing the study of additional mechanisms that require external intervention or alterations of payoff functions, our work highlights the potential of implicit competition in promoting cooperation.

Keywords: Public goods; Experiment; Divided loyalties; Competition; Resources; Endogenous membership (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C72 C91 C92 H41 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2019
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (3)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0899825619300168
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
Working Paper: The Market for Talent: Competition for Resources and Self-Governance in Teams (2018)
Working Paper: The Market for Talent: Competition for Resources and Self- Governance in Teams (2018)
Working Paper: The market for talent: Competition for resources and self governance in teams (2016)
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:gamebe:v:114:y:2019:i:c:p:268-284

DOI: 10.1016/j.geb.2019.02.006

Access Statistics for this article

Games and Economic Behavior is currently edited by E. Kalai

More articles in Games and Economic Behavior from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu (repec@elsevier.com).