Creativity Under Fire: The Effects of Competition on Creative Production

Daniel Gross

No 16-109, Harvard Business School Working Papers from Harvard Business School

Abstract: Though fundamental to innovation and essential to many industries and occupations, individual creativity has received limited attention as an economic behavior and has historically proven difficult to study. This paper studies the incentive effects of competition on individuals' creative production. Using a sample of commercial logo design competitions, and a novel, content-based measure of originality, I find that intensifying competition induces agents to produce original, untested ideas over tweaking their earlier work, but heavy competition drives them to stop investing altogether. The results yield lessons for the management of creative workers and for the implementation of competitive procurement mechanisms for innovation.

Keywords: Creativity; Incentives; Tournaments; Competition; Radical vs. incremental innovation (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D81 M52 M55 O31 O32 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 70 pages
Date: 2016-03, Revised 2018-09
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cbe, nep-cse, nep-cul, nep-ent, nep-ino, nep-neu and nep-tid
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (8)

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http://www.hbs.edu/faculty/pages/download.aspx?name=16-109.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: Creativity Under Fire: The Effects of Competition on Creative Production (2020)
Working Paper: Creativity Under Fire: The Effects of Competition on Creative Production (2018)
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:hbs:wpaper:16-109

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