IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/ebl/ecbull/eb-17-00850.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

Effort Complementarity and Team Size, An Experimental Analysis of Moral Hazard in Teams

Author

Listed:
  • Francisco JM Costa

    (FGV EPGE Escola Brasileira de Economia e Finanças)

  • Joisa Dutra

    (FGV CERI Centro de Estudo em Regulação e Infraestrutura)

Abstract

We use laboratory experiments to analyze the effects of team size in a voluntary contribution mechanism model when contribution levels are either complementary or substitutes. A simple model shows that different team production functions provides different incentives for its members according to team size. When contributions are substitutes within teams, bigger groups increases free-riding by the decreasing marginal per capita return of effort. On the other hand, if contributions are complementary within teams, in theory, group production could increase with group size. Our results show that when efforts are substitutes the contribution level is significantly higher than when efforts are complementary and that, for both production functions, smaller groups induce higher contribution levels.

Suggested Citation

  • Francisco JM Costa & Joisa Dutra, 2018. "Effort Complementarity and Team Size, An Experimental Analysis of Moral Hazard in Teams," Economics Bulletin, AccessEcon, vol. 38(1), pages 20-29.
    • Handle: RePEc:ebl:ecbull:eb-17-00850
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://www.accessecon.com/Pubs/EB/2018/Volume38/EB-18-V38-I1-P3.pdf
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    More about this item

    Keywords

    Voluntary contribution mechanism; Coordination games; Group-incentives; Public goods.;
    All these keywords.

    JEL classification:

    • D8 - Microeconomics - - Information, Knowledge, and Uncertainty
    • C9 - Mathematical and Quantitative Methods - - Design of Experiments

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:ebl:ecbull:eb-17-00850. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: John P. Conley (email available below). General contact details of provider: .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.