Collaboration and free-riding in team contests

Team formation with complementary skills

“…The likelihood of winning the contest was determined by the team's points and its competitor's points . The winner of the contest was determined probabilistically according to a piecewise linear contest success function (Büyükboyaci & Robbett, ; Gächter et al, ; Gill and Prowse, ). Specifically, team producing units of output competing against team producing units of output wins the contest with probability (bounded by 0 and 1) .…”

“…Participants collected close to the maximum number of balls in the piece rate stage (see Table A1). 8 In Büyükboyaci and Robbett (2017), there were two types: One that could catch 30 red and 60 blue in 90 s and the other that could catch 100 red and 25 blue in 90 s. Participants were always matched with the opposite type. 9 We chose these specific types and this particular distribution of types for several reasons.…”

“…In Büyükboyaci and Robbett (), there were two types: One that could catch 30 red and 60 blue in 90 s and the other that could catch 100 red and 25 blue in 90 s. Participants were always matched with the opposite type.…”

Ego-relevance in team production

“…Moreover, weak players do not free-ride in perfect-substitute contests, as the theory predicts, and the most likely explanation is that participants come to bond with their teammates (Sheremeta, 2011). Another critical question in this literature is how to sort heterogeneous agents into teams, aiming to increase individual efforts (Brookins et al, 2015(Brookins et al, , 2018Büyükboyacı and Robbett, 2017). This mechanism is blocked in our experimental setting, since we match participants with the closer scores in a similar task individually.…”

“…Team production environments are generally prone to free-riding and shirking among teammates (Alchian and Demsetz, 1972;Büyükboyacı and Robbett, 2017). However, the literature is silent on how this may depend on the ego-relevance of tasks in a team project.…”