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“Success breeds success” or “Pride goes before a fall”?

Qiang Fu, Changxia Ke and Fangfang Tan

Games and Economic Behavior, 2015, vol. 94, issue C, 57-79

Abstract: We study the impact of progress feedback on players' performance in multi-contest team tournaments, in which team members' efforts are not directly substitutable. In particular, we employ a real-effort laboratory experiment to understand, in a best-of-three tournament, how players' strategic mindsets change when they compete on a team compared to when they compete individually. Our data corroborate the theoretical predictions for teams: Neither a lead nor a lag in the first component contest affects a team's performance in the subsequent contests. In individual tournaments, however, contrary to the theoretical prediction, we observe that leaders perform worse—but laggards perform better—after learning the outcome of the first contest. Our findings offer the first empirical evidence from a controlled laboratory of the impact of progress feedback between team and individual tournaments, and contribute new insights on team incentives.

Keywords: Multi-contest tournaments; Real effort; Feedback; Team incentive; Experiment (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C91 D72 D74 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2015
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (8)

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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:gamebe:v:94:y:2015:i:c:p:57-79

DOI: 10.1016/j.geb.2015.09.002

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