Competition and Fatigue

Abstract

We study how subjects deal with fatigue in a sequence of tournaments that are linked through fatigue spillovers. Our contribution is threefold. First, we develop a model that allows us to predict the consequences of varying the severity of competition as well as the ease of recovery over time. Second, we test how fatigue spillovers affect subjects' effort provision. Third, as we employ both, a chosen-effort and a real-effort task, we contribute to the methodological question of the consistency of insights obtained from both paradigms. Our experimental results suggest that subjects have difficulties in dealing with fatigue within a dynamic competitive environment. The model predicts strategic resting before and after a tournament with higher incentives. While an increase in incentives in one tournament does lead to higher effort in that tournament, we do not observe the expected strategic resting before and after that tournament. As a consequence, the increase in incentives does not yield the expected higher total effort.

Keywords: incentives; fatigue; recovery; tournament; theory; experiment;

JEL Classification: C72, C91, D91, J22, J33, J81, L2, M52