Incentives versus Sorting in Tournaments: Evidence from a Field Experiment

Edwin Leuven, Hessel Oosterbeek, Joep Sonnemans () and Bas van der Klaauw

Journal of Labor Economics, 2011, vol. 29, issue 3, 637 - 658

Abstract: Existing field evidence on rank-order tournaments typically does not allow disentangling incentive and sorting effects. We conduct a field experiment illustrating the confounding effect. Students in an introductory microeconomics course selected themselves into tournaments with low, medium, or high prizes for the best score at the final exam. Nonexperimental analysis of the results would suggest that higher rewards induce higher productivity, but a comparison between treatment and control groups reveals that there is no such effect. This stresses the importance of nonrandom sorting into tournaments.

Date: 2011
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (42)

Downloads: (external link)
http://dx.doi.org/10.1086/659345 (application/pdf)
http://dx.doi.org/10.1086/659345 (text/html)
Access to the online full text or PDF requires a subscription.

Related works:
Working Paper: Incentives Versus Sorting in Tournaments: Evidence from a Field Experiment (2008)
Working Paper: Incentives versus Sorting in Tournaments: Evidence from a Field Experiment (2008)
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:ucp:jlabec:doi:10.1086/659345

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in Journal of Labor Economics from University of Chicago Press
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Journals Division ().