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Tournaments and piece rates revisited: a theoretical and experimental study of output-dependent prize tournaments

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  • Werner Güth
  • René Levínský
  • Kerstin Pull
  • Ori Weisel

Abstract

Tournaments represent an increasingly important component of organizational compensation systems. While prior research focused on fixed-prize tournaments where the prize to be awarded is set in advance, we introduce ‘output-dependent prizes’ where the tournament prize is endogenously determined by agents’ output—it is high when the output is high and low when the output is low. We show that tournaments with output-dependent prizes outperform fixed-prize tournaments and piece rates. A multi-agent experiment supports the theoretical result. Copyright Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2016

Suggested Citation

  • Werner Güth & René Levínský & Kerstin Pull & Ori Weisel, 2016. "Tournaments and piece rates revisited: a theoretical and experimental study of output-dependent prize tournaments," Review of Economic Design, Springer;Society for Economic Design, vol. 20(1), pages 69-88, March.
    • Handle: RePEc:spr:reecde:v:20:y:2016:i:1:p:69-88
    DOI: 10.1007/s10058-015-0184-7
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    Cited by:

    1. Thomas Glökler & Kerstin Pull & Manfred Stadler, 2022. "Do Output-Dependent Prizes Alleviate the Sabotage Problem in Tournaments?," Games, MDPI, vol. 13(5), pages 1-20, September.
    2. Avrahami Judith & Kareev Yaakov & Uske Tobias & Gueth Werner, 2017. "On the Incentive Effects of Sample Size in Monitoring Agents – A Theoretical and Experimental Analysis," German Economic Review, De Gruyter, vol. 18(1), pages 81-98, February.
    3. Majerczyk, Michael & Sheremeta, Roman & Tian, Yu, 2019. "Adding tournament to tournament: Combining between-team and within-team incentives," Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization, Elsevier, vol. 166(C), pages 1-11.
    4. Chen, Yi-Yi, 2020. "Intergroup competition with an endogenously determined prize level," Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization, Elsevier, vol. 178(C), pages 759-776.
    5. Dmitry B. Rokhlin & Anatoly Usov, 2017. "Asymptotic efficiency of the proportional compensation scheme for a large number of producers," Papers 1701.06038, arXiv.org.

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    More about this item

    Keywords

    Tournaments; Relative performance; Experiment; Principal-agent; J3; L2;
    All these keywords.

    JEL classification:

    • J3 - Labor and Demographic Economics - - Wages, Compensation, and Labor Costs
    • L2 - Industrial Organization - - Firm Objectives, Organization, and Behavior

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