Standard-Nutzungsbedingungen:Die Dokumente auf EconStor dürfen zu eigenen wissenschaftlichen Zwecken und zum Privatgebrauch gespeichert und kopiert werden.Sie dürfen die Dokumente nicht für öffentliche oder kommerzielle Zwecke vervielfältigen, öffentlich ausstellen, öffentlich zugänglich machen, vertreiben oder anderweitig nutzen.Sofern die Verfasser die Dokumente unter Open-Content-Lizenzen (insbesondere CC-Lizenzen) zur Verfügung gestellt haben sollten, gelten abweichend von diesen Nutzungsbedingungen die in der dort genannten Lizenz gewährten Nutzungsrechte. Rankings are a pervasive feature of the finance industry. Although they have no direct monetary consequences, rankings provide utility for intrinsic (positive self-image) and extrinsic (status) reasons. We recruit a unique subject pool of 204 financial professionals and investigate how anonymous rankings influence risk-taking in investment decisions. We find that rankings increase risk-taking because of financial professionals' desire for positive self-image. This particularly applies to underperformers, who take the highest risks. Incentivizing rankings monetarily does not further increase risk-taking. In a comparative study with 432 students we find that student behavior is not driven by rankings. Terms of use: Documents inJEL: G02, G11, D03, C93

Standard-Nutzungsbedingungen:Die Dokumente auf EconStor dürfen zu eigenen wissenschaftlichen Zwecken und zum Privatgebrauch gespeichert und kopiert werden.Sie dürfen die Dokumente nicht für öffentliche oder kommerzielle Zwecke vervielfältigen, öffentlich ausstellen, öffentlich zugänglich machen, vertreiben oder anderweitig nutzen.Sofern die Verfasser die Dokumente unter Open-Content-Lizenzen (insbesondere CC-Lizenzen) zur Verfügung gestellt haben sollten, gelten abweichend von diesen Nutzungsbedingungen die in der dort genannten Lizenz gewährten Nutzungsrechte. Terms of use: Documents in EconStor may be saved and copied for your personal and scholarly purposes.You are not to copy documents for public or commercial purposes, to exhibit the documents publicly, to make them publicly available on the internet, or to distribute or otherwise use the documents in public. licence. www.econstor.eu Any opinions expressed here are those of the author(s) and not those of IZA. Research published in this series may include views on policy, but the institute itself takes no institutional policy positions. If the documents have been made available under an Open Content Licence (especially Creative Commons Licences), you may exercise further usage rights as specified in the indicated D I S C U S S I O N P A P E R S E R I E SThe Institute for the Study of Labor (IZA) in Bonn is a local and virtual international research center and a place of communication between science, politics and business. IZA is an independent nonprofit organization supported by Deutsche Post Foundation. The center is associated with the University of Bonn and offers a stimulating research environment through its international network, workshops and conferences, data service, project support, research visits and doctoral program. IZA engages in (i) original and internationally competitive research in all fields of labor economics, (ii) development of policy concepts, and (iii) dissemination of research results and concepts to the interested public.IZA Discussion Papers often represent preliminary work and are circulated to encourage discussion. Citation of such a paper should account for its provisional character. A revised version may be available directly from the author. an increase in the points awarded for victory in soccer tournaments has affected the incidence of fouls, yellow cards (booking) and red cards (immediate dismissal) and the number of defensive players in a team. Their main finding has been that stronger incentives have increased the defensive play of teams and the incidence of fouls and thus yellow and red cards.In this paper we also use data from a sports tournament, in particular from Judo World Championships, in order to examine the response of sabotage to changes in its cost structure, as well as its relationship with a number of personal characteristics such as (relative) ability and gender. To our knowledge, this is the first paper presenting field evidence on the interplay between the cost and the extent of sabotage. While previ...

Often, the interpretation of experiments concerning the manipulation of the energy distribution of laser-accelerated ion bunches is complicated by the multitude of competing dynamic processes simultaneously contributing to recorded ion signals. Here we demonstrate experimentally the acceleration of a clean proton bunch. This was achieved with a microscopic and three-dimensionally confined near critical density plasma, which evolves from a 1 µm diameter plastic sphere, which is levitated and positioned with micrometer precision in the focus of a Petawatt laser pulse. The emitted proton bunch is reproducibly observed with central energies between 20 and 40 MeV and narrow energy spread (down to 25%) showing almost no low-energetic background. Together with three-dimensional particle-in-cell simulations we track the complete acceleration process, evidencing the transition from organized acceleration to Coulomb repulsion. This reveals limitations of current high power lasers and viable paths to optimize laser-driven ion sources.

Rankings are omnipresent in the finance industry, yet the literature is silent on how they impact financial professionals' behavior. Using lab-in-the-field experiments with 657 professionals and lab experiments with 432 students, we investigate how rank incentives affect investment decisions. We find that both rank and tournament incentives increase risk-taking among underperforming professionals, while only tournament incentives affect students. This rank effect is robust to the experimental frame (investment frame vs. abstract frame), to payoff consequences (own return vs. family return), to social identity priming (private identity vs. professional identity), and to professionals' gender (no gender differences among professionals).IN RECENT YEARS, EXCESSIVE RISK-TAKING in the finance industry has been depicted as one of the main factors contributing to the global financial crisis * All authors contributed equally. Michael Kirchler is in the (Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission (2011), Dewatripont and Freixas (2012)). In particular, bonus schemes and tournament incentives have been identified as among the main drivers of excessive risk-taking in developed financial markets (Rajan (2006), Diamond and Rajan (2009), Bebchuk and Spamann (2010)). Tournament incentives are characterized by two major components. The first and more obvious component comprises salary and other material rewards that depend on performance, which create rank-dependent "monetary incentives" to outperform others. The second and less obvious component comprises "nonmonetary incentives" to outperform peers. This second component-called "rank incentives"-provides utility to those at the top of the ranking and disutility to those at the bottom (Barankay (2015)) and thus captures relative performance preferences. 1 These nonmonetary, relative performance preferences can be driven by the desire for a positive self-image (Bénabou and Tirole (2006), Köszegi (2006)), or by concerns about public status (Frank (1985), Moldovanu, Sela, and Shi (2007)). Hence, rank incentives play a prominent, explicit role in tournaments. In the finance industry, rankings, ratings, and awards are the visible hallmarks of a strong culture of relative performance measurement and social competition. Funds are ranked or rated annually as are their managers. 2 Awards to the "Fund Manager of the Year," "Banker of the Year," or "Analyst of the Year" are sought-after distinctions in many areas of finance. 3 More informally, financial professionals (henceforth, professionals) often compare themselves with others in discussions about their investments and successes ("cheap talk"; see Crawford (1998)), effectively ranking each other on an ongoing basis. Recent evidence from laboratory and field experiments shows that, on average, rank incentives increase individuals' effort and performance (Azmat and Iriberri (2010), Blanes-i-Vidal and Nossol (2011), Tran and Zeckhauser (2012), Bandiera, Barankay, and Rasul (2013), Delfgaauw et al. (2013)), but they also promote unethical behavior...

The efficiency of financial markets and their potential to produce bubbles are central topics in academic and professional debates. Yet, little is known about the contribution of financial professionals to price efficiency. We run 116 experimental markets with 412 professionals and 502 students. We find that professional markets with bubble drivers – capital inflows or high initial capital supply – are susceptible to bubbles, although they are more efficient than student markets. In mixed markets with students, bubbles also occur, but professionals act as price stabilizers. We show that heterogeneous price beliefs drive overpricing, especially in bubble-prone market environments. Authors have furnished an Internet Appendix, which is available on the Oxford University Press Web site next to the link to the final published paper online.