Competition and fatigue

Vera Angelova, Thomas Giebe and Radosveta Ivanova-Stenzel

Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization, 2022, vol. 198, issue C, 236-249

Abstract: We study how subjects deal with fatigue in a sequence of tournaments that are linked through fatigue spillovers. We develop a model that allows us to predict the consequences of varying the severity of competition as well as the ease of recovery over time. Even in the presence of fatigue, effort should positively respond to an increase in incentives in a single tournament. A less obvious consequence is the need for strategic resting before and after that tournament. We test our theory using a chosen-effort experiment. While an increase in incentives in the second of three tournaments does lead to higher effort in that tournament, we observe only a tendency for the predicted strategic resting before and after. The increase in incentives does not yield the predicted higher total effort. When recovery is made harder, effort responds negatively as predicted. We complement our study with a real-effort task. Subjects seem to have difficulties simultaneously dealing with physical fatigue as well as the cognitive problem of allocating effort over time.

Keywords: Incentives; Fatigue; Recovery; Tournament; Theory; Experiment (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C72 C91 D91 J22 L2 M52 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2022
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0167268122001275
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
Working Paper: Competition and Fatigue At Work (2018)
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:jeborg:v:198:y:2022:i:c:p:236-249

DOI: 10.1016/j.jebo.2022.03.032

Access Statistics for this article

Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization is currently edited by Houser, D. and Puzzello, D.

More articles in Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().