The Efficacy of Tournaments for Non-Routine Team Tasks

Florian Englmaier, Stefan Grimm, Dominik Grothe, David Schindler and Simeon Schudy

No 16360, CEPR Discussion Papers from Centre for Economic Policy Research

Abstract: Tournaments are often used to improve performance in innovation contexts. Tournaments provide monetary incentives but also render teams' identity and social-image concerns salient. We study the effects of tournaments on team performance in a non-routine task and identify the importance of these behavioral aspects. In a natural field experiment (n > 1,700 participants), we vary the salience of team identity, social-image concerns, and whether teams face monetary incentives. Increased salience of team identity does not improve performance. Social-image motivates mainly the top-performing teams. Additional monetary incentives improve all teams' outcomes without crowding out teams' willingness to explore or perform similar tasks again.

Keywords: Team work; Tournaments; Rankings; Incentives; Identity; Image concerns; Innovation; Exploration; Natural field experiment (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C93 D90 J24 J33 M52 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2021-07
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Related works:
Journal Article: The Efficacy of Tournaments for Nonroutine Team Tasks (2024)
Working Paper: The Efficacy of Tournaments for Non-Routine Team Tasks (2023)
Working Paper: The Efficacy of Tournaments for Non-Routine Team Tasks (2021)
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