Incentives versus Sorting in Tournaments: Evidence from a Field Experiment

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

No 3326, IZA Discussion Papers from Institute of Labor Economics (IZA)

Abstract: A vast body of empirical studies lends support to the incentive effects of rank-order tournaments. Evidence comes from experiments in laboratories and non-experimental studies exploiting sports or firm data. Selection of competitors across tournaments may bias these non-experimental studies, whereas short task duration or lack of distracters may limit the external validity of results obtained in lab experiments or from sports data. To address these concerns we conducted a field experiment where students selected themselves into tournaments with different prizes. Within each tournament the best performing student on the final exam of a standard introductory microeconomics course could win a substantial financial reward. A standard non-experimental analysis exploiting across tournament variation in reward size and competitiveness confirms earlier findings. We find however no evidence for effects of tournament participation on study effort and exam results when we exploit our experimental design, indicating that the non-experimental results are completely due to sorting. Treatment only affects attendance of the first workgroup meeting following the announcement of treatment status, suggesting a difference between short-run and long-run decision making.

Keywords: incentives; sorting; field experiments; tournaments (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C93 J33 M52 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 24 pages
Date: 2008-01
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-exp and nep-lab
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

Published - published in: Journal of Labor Economics, 2011, 29 (3), 637-658

Downloads: (external link)
https://docs.iza.org/dp3326.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: Incentives versus Sorting in Tournaments: Evidence from a Field Experiment (2011)
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:iza:izadps:dp3326

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
IZA, Margard Ody, P.O. Box 7240, D-53072 Bonn, Germany

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in IZA Discussion Papers from Institute of Labor Economics (IZA) IZA, P.O. Box 7240, D-53072 Bonn, Germany. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Holger Hinte ().