Sorting and communication in weak-link group contests

Brookins, Philip; Lightle, John P.; Ryvkin, Dmitry

doi:10.1016/j.jebo.2018.05.010

Cited by 18 publications

(10 citation statements)

References 47 publications

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“…As discussed above, the primary focus of the team contest literature is on the provision of costly effort and an overarching conclusion is that teams regularly overprovided chosen effort relative to the Nash equilibrium . With respect to the optimal formation of teams under different production technologies, Brookins, Lightle, and Ryvkin (, ) investigate how a principal should organize agents who differ in their overall abilities when teammates' efforts are perfect substitutes or perfect complements. These studies differ from the current paper in that they study teammates engaged in an identical task with heterogeneous values for the prize or costs of effort, whereas we consider teammates each engaged in two distinct tasks, with heterogeneous skills at each, while holding constant their overall costs and benefits.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Team formation with complementary skills

Büyükboyacı

Robbett

2018

Economics Manag Strategy

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One explanation for the prevalence of self‐managed work teams is that they enable workers with complementary skills to specialize in the tasks they do best, a benefit that may be enhanced if workers can sort themselves into teams. To assess this explanation, we design a real‐effort experiment to study the endogenous formation of teams, and its effect on productivity, when specialization either is or is not feasible. We find a strong positive interaction between endogenous team formation and the ability to specialize, indicating that endogenous team formation is a particularly effective mechanism for promoting team output in production environments that enable the exploitation of skill complementarities.

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Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Team formation with complementary skills

Büyükboyacı

Robbett

2018

Economics Manag Strategy

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“…For example, as predicted by the theory, experimental studies find that individual efforts are higher when members of the group are rewarded proportionally to their performance than when they are rewarded equally independent of their performance (Amaldoss et al, 2000;Gunnthorsdottir and Rapoport, 2006;Kugler et al, 2010;Majerczyk et al, 2017). Also, consistent with the theory, behavior of individuals crucially depends on the group impact function, with the perfect-substitutes function generating the highest group effort (Abbink et al, 2010;Ahn et al, 2011;Ke et al, 2013Ke et al, , 2015, the weakest-link function generating the least free-riding (Cason et al, 2012(Cason et al, , 2017Brookins et al, 2018), and the bestshot function generating the highest relative effort by strong players . Another prediction supported by the data is that when players are heterogeneous, stronger players expend more effort and weaker players are more likely to free-ride; this is what Mancur Olson referred to as "exploitation of the great by the small", and is observed in experiments by Sheremeta (2011), Brookins et al (2015, 2018), Hargreaves Heap et al (2015 and Bhattacharya (2016).…”

Section: Group Contestsmentioning

confidence: 72%

Experimental Research on Contests

Sheremeta

2018

The New Palgrave Dictionary of Economics

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Costly competitions between economic agents are modeled as contests. Researchers use laboratory experiments to study contests and test comparative static predictions of contest theory. Commonly, researchers find that participants' efforts are significantly higher than predicted by the standard Nash equilibrium. Despite overbidding, most comparative static predictions, such as the incentive effect, the size effect, the discouragement effect and others are supported in the laboratory. In addition, experimental studies examine various contest structures, including dynamic contests (such as multi-stage races, wars of attrition, tug-of-wars), multi-dimensional contests (such as Colonel Blotto games), and contests between groups. This article provides a short review of such studies.

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“…(, ) and Brookins et al . (), who further document that in the weakest‐link contests most groups reach a very high level of cooperation when they are allowed to communicate.…”

Section: Factors Influencing Behavior In Group Contestsmentioning

confidence: 91%

Behavior in Group Contests: A Review of Experimental Research

Sheremeta

2017

Journal of Economic Surveys

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Group contests are ubiquitous. Some examples include warfare between countries, competition between political parties, team-incentives within firms, group sports, and rent-seeking. In order to succeed, members of the same group have incentives to cooperate with each other by expending individual efforts. However, since effort is costly, each member also has an incentive to abstain from expending any effort and instead free-ride on the efforts of other members. Contest theory shows that the intensity of competition between groups and the amount of freeriding within groups depend on the group size, sharing rule, group impact function, contest success function, and heterogeneity of players. We review experimental studies testing these theoretical predictions. Almost all studies of behavior in group contests find significant overexpenditure of effort relative to the theory. We discuss potential explanations for such overexpenditure, including the utility of winning, bounded rationality, relative payoff maximization, parochial altruism, and social identity. Despite over-expenditure, most studies find support for the comparative statics predictions of the theory (with the exception of the "group size paradox"). Finally, studies show that there are effective mechanisms that can promote withingroup cooperation and conflict resolution mechanisms that can de-escalate and potentially eliminate between-group conflict.JEL Classifications: C7, C9, D7, H4, J4, K4, L2, M5

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Sorting and communication in weak-link group contests

Cited by 18 publications

References 47 publications

Team formation with complementary skills

Team formation with complementary skills

Experimental Research on Contests

Behavior in Group Contests: A Review of Experimental Research

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