Research report 2015 - Max Planck Institute for Tax Law and Public Finance
When failure motivates
Authors
Tan, Fangfang
Departments
Abteilung für Finanzwissenschaft
Summary
A recently published paper by Qiang Fu, Changxia Ke and Fangfang Tan offers a first empirical evidence of the impact of progress feedback between team and individual tournaments, and provides new insights on team incentives. The economists show: The leader in a competition performs worse when he realizes his advantageous position, whereas the laggard will benefit from knowing that he lies behind. This applies to individual contestants, but not to contestants competing in a team.