A New Solution for the Moral Hazard Problem in Team Production

Pablo Guillen, Danielle Merrett () and Robert Slonim
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Danielle Merrett: Business School, University of Sydney, New South Wales 2006, Australia

Management Science, 2015, vol. 61, issue 7, 1514-1530

Abstract: We propose an intergroup competition scheme (ICS) to theoretically solve free riding in team production and provide experimental evidence from a voluntary contribution mechanism public goods game. The ICS includes an internal transfer payment from the lowest to highest contributing team proportional to the difference in group contributions. The ICS requires minimal information, makes the efficient contribution a dominant strategy, and is budget balanced. These features make the ICS ideally suited to solve the moral hazard problem in team production. Our experiment demonstrates that the ICS raises contributions to almost reach optimality with the appropriate parameters. We also show experimentally that the success of the ICS can be primarily attributed to the effect of higher returns and to the introduction of competition, and it is not due to the introduction of potential losses or information regarding other groups.Data, as supplemental material, are available at http://dx.doi.org/10.1287/mnsc.2014.1922 . This paper was accepted by Uri Gneezy, behavioral economics .

Keywords: team production; moral hazard; free riding; public goods; intergroup competition; voluntary contributions mechanism; economic experiments (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2015
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (6)

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http://dx.doi.org/10.1287/mnsc.2014.1922 (application/pdf)

Related works:
Working Paper: A new solution for the moral hazard problem in team production (2013)
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:inm:ormnsc:v:61:y:2015:i:7:p:1514-1530

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