Tournaments and Office Politics: Evidence from a Real Effort Experiment

Abstract

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Does competition enhance performance or cheating? A laboratory experiment

“…3 A related branch of literature looks at sabotage in tournaments which represent situations of heightened competition (for experimental investigation see e.g. Irlenbusch, 2003a, 2003b;Harbring et al, 2004;Carpenter et al, 2007). While both phenomena, illegitimately harming others ("sabotage") and enhancing oneself ("cheating"), may be two sides of the same coin, we believe that in the real world individuals have more opportunities (and less moral concerns) to make themselves look better than sabotaging others.…”

Ceding control: an experimental analysis of participatory management

“…What differences do exist, however, should to work against finding a participation effect. Fewer men were assigned to the Participation treatment in which their votes counted and the extensive previous literature (e.g., Niederle and Vesterlund, 2011;Carpenter et al, 2010) suggests that (i) men prefer tournaments (relative to women) and (ii) tournaments tend to be more productive. Those in the No participation treatment were also slightly more competitive, on average, and, most importantly, ability is a little higher in the No participation treatment.…”

Sabotage in Contests: A Survey

“…As sabotage can be understood as the opposite of help (because sabotage reduces another player's performance, whereas help increases it), their …ndings imply that sabotage is empirically relevant. This conclusion is con…rmed by numerous laboratory experiments (Harbring and Irlenbusch 2004, 2008Harbring et al 2007;Falk et al 2008;Vandegrift and Yavas 2010;Carpenter et al 2010;and Gürtler et al 2011), and …eld studies from sports (Balafoutas et al 2012;Brown and Chowdhury 2014;and Deutscher et al 2013). 6 Beviá and Corchón (2006) is an exception.…”