Observation delays in teams and effort cycles

Sidartha Gordon, Chantal Marlats and Lucie Ménager

Games and Economic Behavior, 2021, vol. 130, issue C, 276-298

Abstract: This paper studies the dynamics of effort provision in teams when there are exogenous observation delays between partners. Agents are engaged in a common project whose duration is uncertain and yields no benefit until one of them has completed it. All it takes to complete the project is one success, which can be obtained after the investment of costly effort. An agent learns immediately when he succeeds but learns whether his partners succeeded after some delay. In equilibrium, players alternate between periods in which they exert the maximal effort and periods in which they make no effort at all. Better information transmission leads to shorter and more frequent rest periods. The size of the team has a positive impact on the players' payoff. Finally, introducing a small observation delay increases the average effort of patient players and makes them complete the project faster in expectation.

Keywords: Team work; Observation delays; Free riding (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2021
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0899825621001068
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:gamebe:v:130:y:2021:i:c:p:276-298

DOI: 10.1016/j.geb.2021.07.014

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 ().