Cooperation and Competition in Intergenerational Experiments in the Field and the Laboratory

Gary Charness and Marie Claire Villeval

No 931, Working Papers from Groupe d'Analyse et de Théorie Economique Lyon St-Étienne (GATE Lyon St-Étienne), Université de Lyon

Abstract: There is economic pressure towards the postponement of the retirement age, but employers are still reluctant to employ older workers. We investigate the comparative behavior of juniors and seniors in experiments conducted both onsite with the employees of two large firms and in a conventional laboratory environment with students and retirees. We show that seniors are no more risk averse than juniors and are typically more cooperative ; both juniors and working seniors respond strongly to competition. The implication is that it may be beneficial to define additional incentives near the end of the career to motivate and retain older workers.

Keywords: Age; performance; diversity; stereotypes; cooperation; competition; inter-generational games; experiments (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: A13 B49 C91 C93 J14 J18 J38 J70 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 45 pages
Date: 2009
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (86)

Downloads: (external link)
ftp://ftp.gate.cnrs.fr/RePEc/2009/0931.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: Cooperation and Competition in Intergenerational Experiments in the Field and the Laboratory (2009)
Working Paper: Cooperation and Competition in Intergenerational Experiments in the Field and in the Laboratory (2009)
Working Paper: Cooperation and Competition in Intergenerational Experiments in the Field and the Laboratory (2009)
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:gat:wpaper:0931

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Working Papers from Groupe d'Analyse et de Théorie Economique Lyon St-Étienne (GATE Lyon St-Étienne), Université de Lyon Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Nelly Wirth ( this e-mail address is bad, please contact ).