Mixed Tournaments, Common Shocks, and Disincentives: An Experimental Study

Steven Wu (), Brian Roe and Thomas Sporleder ()

MPRA Paper from University Library of Munich, Germany

Abstract: Experimental economics is used to investigate two important hypotheses proposed in the economics literature on tournaments. Specifically, we test for a hypothesized “disincentives effect” which can occur in tournaments with mixed ability agents. We also test the well known hypothesis that, when common shocks are an important source of risk, tournaments can filter out this common shock and reduce earnings risk to workers. We find that disincentive effects arose in our tournament experiments, although these effects are not as strong as we predicted in our theoretical model and simulations. We also find that tournaments can be very effective at reducing earnings variation when common shocks are important. Taken together, these results suggest that the benefits of risk reduction from eliminating common shocks might outweigh the disincentive effects arising from mixed tournaments. We also find that the difference in average earnings between low and high ability agents is greater under tournaments than under absolute performance contracts.

Keywords: mixed tournaments; incentives; relative performance contracts; experimental economics (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D86 J33 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2006-09
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cbe and nep-exp
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (5)

Downloads: (external link)
https://mpra.ub.uni-muenchen.de/21/1/MPRA_paper_21.pdf original version (application/pdf)

Related works:
Working Paper: Mixed Tournaments, Common Shocks, and Disincentives: An Experimental Study (2007)
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:pra:mprapa:21

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in MPRA Paper from University Library of Munich, Germany Ludwigstraße 33, D-80539 Munich, Germany. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Joachim Winter ().