Quitters Never Win: The (Adverse) Incentive Effects of Competing with Superstars

Abstract

Internal competition may motivate worker effort, yet the benefits of competition may depend critically on workers’ relative abilities: large skill differences may reduce efforts. I use panel data from professional golf tournaments and find that the presence of a superstar is associated with lower performance. On average, golfers’ first-round scores are approximately 0.2 strokes worse when Tiger Woods participates relative to when Woods is absent. The overall tournament effect is 0.8 strokes. The adverse superstar effect varies with the quality of Woods’s play. There is no evidence that reduced performance is attributable to media attention intensity or risky strategy adoption.

Career Prospects and Effort Incentives: Evidence from Professional Soccer

“…Similarly, Brown (2011) shows that superstar Tiger Woods' participation in golf tournaments adversely affects the performances of his rivals, which is consistent with effort incentives being stronger for players with intermediate chances than for players with low chances. 8 Several important differences to our work are worth pointing out.…”

War and conflict in economics: Theories, applications, and recent trends

“…Generally, empirical studies find support for the main predictions of the theory, such as the incentive effect (Knoeber, 1989;Ehrenberg and Bognanno, 1990;Becker and Huselid, 1992;Knoeber and Thurman, 1994), the size effect (Boudreau et al, 2011;List et al, 2014), and the discouragement effect (Brown, 2011;Berger and Nieken, 2016).…”

Selection and incentives in contests: evidence from horse racing

“…For example, designing contests or tournaments so that they are effective in selecting the best competitor has been considered theoretically by Hvide and Kristiansen (2003), Rvykin andOrtmann (2008), andRvykin (2010), and empirically by Harbraugh and Klumpp (2005) and Klumpp and Polborn (2006). Regarding incentives, it has been shown theoretically (Lazear and Rosen, 1981), and in the field (Sunde, 2009, Brown, 2011, Franke, 2012, and Genakos and Pagliero, 2012) that uneven contests elicit less effort from weaker participants. As we stated, this is the first analysis to jointly establish whether a range of contest features can help in the achievement of both selection and incentive goals.…”