Fatigue in Dynamic Tournaments

Employee overwork and fatigue are a concern of managers in many organizations, as they may increase health and safety risks and decrease productivity. The problem is especially severe in competitive environments, where compensation and promotions are awarded, explicitly or implicitly, on the basis of relative performance. We propose a theory for, and study experimentally, the phenomenon of fatigue in a dynamic competitive environment. We find that subjects react strongly to changes in the environment related to fatigue and follow the comparative statics of equilibrium predictions. At the same time, within a given environment, subjects behave as if they are unaware of the deteriorating effect of fatigue on their competitiveness.     

Envy and Compassion in Tournaments

Many experiments and field studies indicate that most individuals are not purely motivated by material self-interest but also care about the well being of others. In this paper, we examine tournaments among inequity averse agents, who dislike disadvantageous inequity (envy) and advantageous inequity (compassion). It turns out that inequity averse agents exert higher efforts than purely self-interested agents for a given prize structure. Contrary to standard tournament theory, first-best efforts cannot be implemented when prizes are endogenous. Furthermore, the choice between vertical and lateral promotions is examined and it is shown that inequity costs have to be traded off against losses in human capital .     

Promotion Tournaments and Individual Performance Pay

We analyze the optimal combination of promotion tournaments and linear individual performance pay in an employment relationship. An agent's effort is nonobservable and he has private information about his suitability for promotion. Thus, the two incentive schemes need to be combined to serve both incentive and selection purposes. If harder working agents respond less to intensified effort incentives, we find that the principal puts less emphasis on individual performance pay when selection becomes more important. Thus, we provide a possible explanation as to why, in practice, individual performance pay is less prevalent than promotion‐based incentives.     

Feedback and Motivation in Dynamic Tournaments

We investigate the choice to conduct interim performance evaluations in a dynamic tournament. When a worker's ability does not influence the marginal benefit of effort, the choice depends on the shape of the cost of effort function. When effort and ability are complementary, feedback has several competing effects: it informs workers about their relative position in the tournament (evaluation effect) as well as their relative productivity (motivation effect) and it creates signal‐jamming incentives to exert effort prior to the performance evaluation. These effects suggest a tradeoff of performance feedback between evaluation and motivation which is in accordance with organizational behavior research and performance appraisal practices.     

Selection Tournaments, Sabotage, and Participation

This paper studies sabotage in tournaments with at least three contestants, where the contestants know each other well. Every contestant has an incentive to direct sabotage specifically against his most dangerous rival. In equilibrium, contestants who choose a higher productive effort are sabotaged more heavily. This might explain findings from psychology, where victims of mobbing are sometimes found to be overachieving. Moreover, sabotage equalizes promotion chances. The effect is most pronounced if the production functions are linear in sabotage, and the cost functions depend only on the sum of all sabotage activities: in an interior equilibrium, who will win is a matter of chance, even when contestants differ a great deal in their abilities. This, in turn, has adverse consequences for who might want to participate in a tournament. Because better contestants anticipate that they will be sabotaged more strongly, it may happen that the most able stay out and the tournament selects one of the less able with probability one. I also study the case where some contestants are easy victims, that is, easier to sabotage than others.     

The Credibility of Performance Feedback in Tournaments

This paper studies the effect of performance feedback on tournament outcomes, when a possibly dishonest principal may manipulate the agents' expectations to stimulate their effort. Under plausible circumstances, an increase in the principal's propensity to tell the truth (i.e., integrity) induces a mean preserving spread in the distribution of effort and leads to a decrease in expected profits and welfare. More generally, I identify conditions under which a lower integrity can improve the effectiveness of financial incentives in inducing the agents' effort, thus leading to higher expected profits for the principal.     

Allocating Ideas: Horizontal Competition in Tournaments

We develop a stylized model of horizontal and vertical competition in tournaments with two competing firms. The sponsor cares not only about the quality of the design but also about the design location. A priori not even the sponsor knows his preferred design location, which is only discovered once he has seen the actual proposals. We show that the more efficient firm is more likely to be conservative when choosing the design location. Also, to get some differentiation in design locations, the cost difference between contestants can be neither too small nor too big. Therefore, if the sponsor mainly cares about the design location, participation in the tournaments by the two lowest-cost contestants cannot be optimal for the sponsor.     

Feedback in Tournaments under Commitment Problems: Experimental Evidence

We theoretically as well as experimentally analyze tournaments in which one of the agents leads over the other before entering the tournament, that is, in which one of the competitors benefits from a head start. The principal may decide upon informing the agents about the degree of this asymmetry. She cannot commit to giving feedback ex ante or not and, thus, chooses the strategy that is optimal for her ex post. In equilibrium, the principal reveals information if the asymmetry is not too large. Our experimental findings qualitatively confirm our theoretical prediction. Moreover, behavior of the principal and the agents is well aligned to each other.     

Dynamic Incentives and Agent Discrimination in Broiler Production Tournaments

The objective of this paper is to test whether broiler processors, after observing their contract growers' abilities in the sequences of repeated short-term contracts, strategically allocate production inputs of varying quality. The strategy can either consist of providing high-ability agents with high-quality inputs or providing low-ability agents with high-quality inputs. The first strategy would stimulate the career concerns type of response on the part of the growers, whereas the second strategy would generate a ratchet effect. We test these hypotheses by using the broiler contract production data. The results show no significant input discrimination based on grower abilities that would lead to either career concerns or ratchet effect type of dynamic incentives.     

Principal‐agent and Peer Relationships in Tournaments

Effort provision in tournaments may depend on both social preferences towards the competitor and social preferences towards the principal who designed the tournament. In a laboratory experiment, we analyze agents' behavior in different tournament settings that vary the distribution of the prize between agents. The principal chooses between a low and a high guaranteed payment. Standard economic theory predicts the same effort provision in all situations. Instead, our results show that both the generosity of the principal and the strict separation between winner and loser increase the effort level in tournaments. Moreover, agents focus their preferences either on the principal or on the agent. Copyright © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

The Impact of Intermediate Information on Sabotage in Tournaments with Heterogeneous Contestants

Applying detailed within‐tournament information about intermediate scores and contestants' ability in rank‐order professional soccer tournaments, this study empirically analyzes the impact of interim results on the sabotage activities of heterogeneous contestants. Intermediate information that suggests that a contest is decided early decreases total sabotage. Splitting contestants into favorites and underdogs reveals that both contestants sabotage the most if intermediate information about the score compensates for or decreases ex ante heterogeneity between the teams. However, engaging in sabotage does not pay off for the contestants. Copyright © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Introduction to the Symposium on Tournaments,Contests, and Relative Performance Evaluation

The papers in this symposium reflect several of the directions taken by current research on tournaments, contests and relative performance evaluation. The papers help us understand the implications of agent heterogeneity on the incentives of agents to perform or self‐select the offers designed for them. They encompass various issues such as career concerns and promotion incentives, interim disclosure of information obtained by the principal about agent performance, exposure to risk choices, and competing for talent.     

贫困大学生职业决策困难与职业指导对策研究

大学生职业决策困难是高校毕业生普遍存在的问题。贫困大学生在面临职业选择时由于职业教育与职业认知模糊,职业能力与职业技能不足,自我认识与职业定位不清晰等问题,导致在职业选择过程中出现职业决策困难的状态。因此,帮助贫困生明确职业选择,做出正确的职业决策,成为贫困大学生的强烈内在需求,也是当前高校职业辅导的重点。     

职业成功观与生涯适应力:一个多步多重中介模型

生涯适应力(career adaptability)是职业生涯建构理论提出的核心概念,是个体实现终身可就业性的保障,而职业成功观作为个体对职业成功的主观评价标准,反应着个体的职业发展目标和动机,本研究以北京市某高校学生(N=437)为样本,在相隔4周的两个时间点收集数据,通过建立多步多重中介模型来探究二者之间的关系.结果表明,职业成功观(内在满足维度)通过易变性职业生涯态度和职业探索两个中介变量多步影响生涯适应力,不仅支持了职业生涯建构理论和自我决定理论,也为实践中提高员工生涯适应力开拓了新视野.     

朗然的HR生涯（6）

六、桐花万里丹山路朗然这个月是彻底地忙飞了,“飞“的意思就是两脚不沾地,同时处理好几件事,没有停下来的间隙。白天充满了繁杂的日常事务,只有下班以后,办公室里安静下来了,才能真正开始她认为最重要的那部分工作,策划和实施Ql么除了标准的1外问题以外,针对企业现阶段的特点     

职场启示

有时候,一个不起眼的小故事,却足以给人意味深长的管理启示。扁鹊的医术魏文王曾求教于名医扁鹊:你们家兄弟三人,都精于医术,到底哪一位最好呢?扁鹊答:长兄最好,中兄次之,我最差。文王再问:那么为什么你最出名呢?扁鹊答:长兄治病,于病情发作之前。百姓由于不知道他事先能铲     

朗然的HR生涯(3)

三、几人真是经纶手 师傅放下碗筷的时候,朗然早已双手奉上清 茶,每当这样的时候,朗然总是执礼愈恭,那副表 情,犹如饕餮之徒遥望满汉全席,垂涎欲滴。 “看懂这幅图了?”师傅啜了口茶,清醇沁人。 “是啊,问题不是随便问的,每个问题都有潜 台词,而且不仅仅一层的潜台词,不但能帮助我 们诊断员工在企业中的感受或者叫敬业度,而且 能指导管理者如何管理和澄清侧重点。” “恩,打算怎么应用呢?” “比如我们现在调查的结果里,员工觉得‘我 的获取’大于‘我的奉献’,说明还有相当的潜力 没有发挥出来,比较一…     

职场启示

高山泉水四季不断的原因 有一所寺院建在一座半山腰,不远处有一眼清澈的泉井,寺中用水就取自于此。一天一个小和尚汲水归来,突发疑问：这高山上都能冒出泉水来,那山下的水井为何不出水呢？而且,山泉上边的山头没有存水的凹处,这四季源源不断的泉水来自何处呢？他百思不解,特去请教师父。