‘Doggedness’ or ‘disengagement’? An experiment on the effect of inequality in endowment on behaviour in team competitions

Shaun Hargreaves Heap, Abhijit Ramalingam, Siddharth Ramalingam and Brock Stoddard
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Siddharth Ramalingam: IDFC Foundation

No 13-08-R, Working Paper series, University of East Anglia, Centre for Behavioural and Experimental Social Science (CBESS) from School of Economics, University of East Anglia, Norwich, UK.

Abstract: Teams often suffer from a free rider problem with respect to individual contributions. That putting teams into competition with each other can mitigate this problem is an important recent insight. However, we know little about how inequality in endowment between teams might influence this beneficial effect from competition. We address this question with an experiment where teams contribute to a public good that then determines their chances of winning a Tullock contest with another team. The boost to efforts from competition disappears when inequality is high. This is mainly because the ‘rich’ ‘disengage’: they make no more contribution to a public good than they would when there is no competition. There is evidence that the ‘poor’ respond to moderate inequality ‘doggedly’, by expending more effort compared to competition with equality, but this ‘doggedness’ disappears too when inequality is high.

JEL-codes: C91 C92 D63 H41 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2015-02
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cbe, nep-cdm and nep-exp
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (16)

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