Competition and Academic Performance: Evidence from a Classroom Experiment

We examine the effect of relative evaluation on academic performance by implementing a classroom-level field experiment in which students are incentivized individually or in a tournament to take a microeconomics quiz. We focus on two aspects of competitive environments that may be particularly salient in academics: tournament size and one's perceived position in the ability distribution. At least in our setting, we find no evidence that effort responses to competition are sensitive to tournament size. However, in contrast to previous studies that examine effort responses to exogenously assigned competition, we find a large negative competition effect for students who believe they are relatively low in the ability distribution and no competition effect for those who believe they are relatively high ability. Using additional treatments, we further show that the divergence between our results and past results is driven by task type and not by differences in selection into participation between lab and field environments.