How Many Winners are Good to Have? On Tournaments with Sabotage

32 Pages Posted: 18 Oct 2005

See all articles by Christine Harbring

Christine Harbring

University of Cologne; IZA Institute of Labor Economics

Bernd Irlenbusch

London School of Economics & Political Science - Department of Management; IZA Institute of Labor Economics

Date Written: September 2005

Abstract

From an employer's perspective a tournament should induce agents to exert productive activities but refrain from destructive ones. We experimentally test the predictive power of a tournament model which suggests that - within a reasonable framework - productive and destructive activities are not influenced neither by the number of agents taking part in the tournament nor by the fraction of the winner prizes. Our results clearly confirm that sabotage in tournaments indeed occurs. While tournament size has virtually no effect on behavior, a balanced fraction of winner and loser prizes seems to particularly enhance productive activities.

Keywords: relative performance evaluation, personnel economics, sabotage, experiments

JEL Classification: D23, J33, L23, C72

Suggested Citation

Harbring, Christine and Irlenbusch, Bernd, How Many Winners are Good to Have? On Tournaments with Sabotage (September 2005). IZA Discussion Paper No. 1777, Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=826346 or http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.826346

Christine Harbring

University of Cologne ( email )

Albertus-Magnus-Platz
Cologne, 50923
Germany
+ 49 (0) 221 / 470 - 7955 (Phone)

IZA Institute of Labor Economics

P.O. Box 7240
Bonn, D-53072
Germany

Bernd Irlenbusch (Contact Author)

London School of Economics & Political Science - Department of Management ( email )

Houghton Street
London, WC2A 2AE
United Kingdom
+44 (0)20 7955 7840 (Phone)
+44 (0)20 7955 6887 (Fax)

HOME PAGE: http://www.lse.ac.uk/collections/management/

IZA Institute of Labor Economics

P.O. Box 7240
Bonn, D-53072
Germany

Do you have negative results from your research you’d like to share?

Paper statistics

Downloads
161
Abstract Views
1,142
Rank
332,714
PlumX Metrics