IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/pra/mprapa/24340.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

Effort in Nomination Contests: Evidence from Professional Soccer

Author

Listed:
  • Miklos-Thal, Jeanine
  • Ullrich, Hannes

Abstract

In most promotion and hiring situations several agents compete for a limited number of attractive positions, assigned on the basis of the agents' relative reputations. Economic theory predicts that agents' effort incentives in such contests depend non-monotonically on their anticipated winning chances, but empirical evidence is lacking. We use panel data to study soccer players' responses to the (informal) nomination contests for being on a national team participating in the 2008 Euro Cup. The control group consists of players who work for the same clubs but are nationals of countries that did not participate in the Euro Cup. We fi�nd that nomination contest participation has substantial positive effects on the performances of players with intermediate chances of being nominated for their national team. Players whose nomination is close to certain perform worse than otherwise, particularly in duels that carry a high injury risk. For players without any recent national team appearances, we fi�nd no signifi�cant effects.

Suggested Citation

  • Miklos-Thal, Jeanine & Ullrich, Hannes, 2010. "Effort in Nomination Contests: Evidence from Professional Soccer," MPRA Paper 24340, University Library of Munich, Germany.
    • Handle: RePEc:pra:mprapa:24340
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://mpra.ub.uni-muenchen.de/24340/1/MPRA_paper_24340.pdf
    File Function: original version
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Lazear, Edward P & Rosen, Sherwin, 1981. "Rank-Order Tournaments as Optimum Labor Contracts," Journal of Political Economy, University of Chicago Press, vol. 89(5), pages 841-864, October.
    2. Benny Moldovanu & Aner Sela, 2008. "The Optimal Allocation of Prizes in Contests," Springer Books, in: Roger D. Congleton & Arye L. Hillman & Kai A. Konrad (ed.), 40 Years of Research on Rent Seeking 1, pages 615-631, Springer.
    3. Canice Prendergast, 1999. "The Provision of Incentives in Firms," Journal of Economic Literature, American Economic Association, vol. 37(1), pages 7-63, March.
    4. Edward Miguel & Sebastián M. Saiegh & Shanker Satyanath, 2008. "National Cultures and Soccer Violence," NBER Working Papers 13968, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
    5. Green, Jerry R & Stokey, Nancy L, 1983. "A Comparison of Tournaments and Contracts," Journal of Political Economy, University of Chicago Press, vol. 91(3), pages 349-364, June.
    6. Marco Ottaviani & Peter Norman Sørensen, 2006. "Reputational cheap talk," RAND Journal of Economics, RAND Corporation, vol. 37(1), pages 155-175, March.
    7. Knoeber, Charles R & Thurman, Walter N, 1994. "Testing the Theory of Tournaments: An Empirical Analysis of Broiler Production," Journal of Labor Economics, University of Chicago Press, vol. 12(2), pages 155-179, April.
    8. Hausman, Jerry & Hall, Bronwyn H & Griliches, Zvi, 1984. "Econometric Models for Count Data with an Application to the Patents-R&D Relationship," Econometrica, Econometric Society, vol. 52(4), pages 909-938, July.
    9. Effinger, Matthias R. & Polborn, Mattias K., 2001. "Herding and anti-herding: A model of reputational differentiation," European Economic Review, Elsevier, vol. 45(3), pages 385-403, March.
    10. Guimarães, Paulo, 2008. "The fixed effects negative binomial model revisited," Economics Letters, Elsevier, vol. 99(1), pages 63-66, April.
    11. Rosen, Sherwin, 1986. "Prizes and Incentives in Elimination Tournaments," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 76(4), pages 701-715, September.
    12. Avinash Dixit, 2008. "Strategic Behavior in Contests," Springer Books, in: Roger D. Congleton & Arye L. Hillman & Kai A. Konrad (ed.), 40 Years of Research on Rent Seeking 1, pages 431-438, Springer.
    13. Jennifer Brown, 2011. "Quitters Never Win: The (Adverse) Incentive Effects of Competing with Superstars," Journal of Political Economy, University of Chicago Press, vol. 119(5), pages 982-1013.
    14. Hoffler, Felix & Sliwka, Dirk, 2003. "Do new brooms sweep clean? When and why dismissing a manager increases the subordinates' performance," European Economic Review, Elsevier, vol. 47(5), pages 877-890, October.
    15. Orszag, Jonathan M., 1994. "A new look at incentive effects and golf tournaments," Economics Letters, Elsevier, vol. 46(1), pages 77-88, September.
    16. Chan, William, 1996. "External Recruitment versus Internal Promotion," Journal of Labor Economics, University of Chicago Press, vol. 14(4), pages 555-570, October.
    17. Marco Ottaviani & Peter Norman Sorensen, 2006. "Reputational Cheap Talk," RAND Journal of Economics, The RAND Corporation, vol. 37(1), pages 155-175, Spring.
    18. Mark Duggan & Steven D. Levitt, 2002. "Winning Isn't Everything: Corruption in Sumo Wrestling," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 92(5), pages 1594-1605, December.
    19. Ehrenberg, Ronald G & Bognanno, Michael L, 1990. "Do Tournaments Have Incentive Effects?," Journal of Political Economy, University of Chicago Press, vol. 98(6), pages 1307-1324, December.
    20. Lazear, Edward P, 1989. "Pay Equality and Industrial Politics," Journal of Political Economy, University of Chicago Press, vol. 97(3), pages 561-580, June.
    21. Garicano, Luis & Palacios-Huerta, Ignacio, 2005. "Sabotage in Tournaments: Making the Beautiful Game a Bit Less Beautiful," CEPR Discussion Papers 5231, C.E.P.R. Discussion Papers.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Lackner, Mario & Stracke, Rudi & Sunde, Uwe & Winter-Ebmer, Rudolf, 2015. "Are Competitors Forward Looking in Strategic Interactions? Evidence from the Field," Economics Series 319, Institute for Advanced Studies.

    Most related items

    These are the items that most often cite the same works as this one and are cited by the same works as this one.
    1. Miklós-Thal, Jeanine & Ullrich, Hannes, 2009. "Nomination contests: theory and empirical evidence from professional soccer," ZEW Discussion Papers 09-027, ZEW - Leibniz Centre for European Economic Research.
    2. Harbring, Christine & Irlenbusch, Bernd, 2003. "An experimental study on tournament design," Labour Economics, Elsevier, vol. 10(4), pages 443-464, August.
    3. Tanaka, Ryuichi & Ishino, Kazutoshi, 2012. "Testing the incentive effects in tournaments with a superstar," Journal of the Japanese and International Economies, Elsevier, vol. 26(3), pages 393-404.
    4. Jennifer Brown, 2011. "Quitters Never Win: The (Adverse) Incentive Effects of Competing with Superstars," Journal of Political Economy, University of Chicago Press, vol. 119(5), pages 982-1013.
    5. Bernd Frick, 2003. "Contest Theory and Sport," Oxford Review of Economic Policy, Oxford University Press and Oxford Review of Economic Policy Limited, vol. 19(4), pages 512-529, Winter.
    6. Waldman, Michael, 2013. "Classic promotion tournaments versus market-based tournaments," International Journal of Industrial Organization, Elsevier, vol. 31(3), pages 198-210.
    7. repec:eee:labchp:v:3:y:1999:i:pb:p:2373-2437 is not listed on IDEAS
    8. Dmitry Ryvkin & Andreas Ortmann, 2008. "The Predictive Power of Three Prominent Tournament Formats," Management Science, INFORMS, vol. 54(3), pages 492-504, March.
    9. Edward P. Lazear & Paul Oyer, 2012. "Personnel Economics [The Handbook of Organizational Economics]," Introductory Chapters,, Princeton University Press.
    10. Sun, Sophia Li & Habib, Ahsan, 2020. "Determinants and consequences of tournament incentives: A survey of the literature in accounting and finance," Research in International Business and Finance, Elsevier, vol. 54(C).
    11. Edward P. Lazear & Kathryn L. Shaw, 2007. "Personnel Economics: The Economist's View of Human Resources," Journal of Economic Perspectives, American Economic Association, vol. 21(4), pages 91-114, Fall.
    12. P.-J. Jost & M. Kräkel, 2005. "Preemptive behavior in sequential-move tournaments with heterogeneous agents," Economics of Governance, Springer, vol. 6(3), pages 245-252, November.
    13. St-Pierre, Marc, 2016. "The role of inequality on effort in tournaments," Mathematical Social Sciences, Elsevier, vol. 81(C), pages 38-52.
    14. Garicano, Luis & Palacios-Huerta, Ignacio, 2005. "Sabotage in Tournaments: Making the Beautiful Game a Bit Less Beautiful," CEPR Discussion Papers 5231, C.E.P.R. Discussion Papers.
    15. Edward P. Lazear, 1995. "Personnel Economics," MIT Press Books, The MIT Press, edition 1, volume 1, number 0262121883, April.
    16. Bernd Irlenbusch, 2006. "Experimental perspectives on incentives in organisations," Central European Journal of Operations Research, Springer;Slovak Society for Operations Research;Hungarian Operational Research Society;Czech Society for Operations Research;Österr. Gesellschaft für Operations Research (ÖGOR);Slovenian Society Informatika - Section for Operational Research;Croatian Operational Research Society, vol. 14(1), pages 1-24, February.
    17. Cedric Duvinage & Peter-J. Jost, 2019. "The Role of Referees in Professional Sports Contests," Journal of Sports Economics, , vol. 20(8), pages 1014-1050, December.
    18. Loukas Balafoutas & E. Glenn Dutcher & Florian Lindner & Dmitry Ryvkin, 2017. "The Optimal Allocation Of Prizes In Tournaments Of Heterogeneous Agents," Economic Inquiry, Western Economic Association International, vol. 55(1), pages 461-478, January.
    19. Markus LANG & Alexander RATHKE & Marco RUNKEL, 2010. "The Economic Consequences Of Foreigner Rules In National Sports Leagues," Region et Developpement, Region et Developpement, LEAD, Universite du Sud - Toulon Var, vol. 31, pages 47-64.
    20. Alexander Matros, 2006. "Elimination Tournaments where Players Have Fixed Resources," Working Paper 205, Department of Economics, University of Pittsburgh, revised Jan 2006.
    21. Tor Eriksson & Sabrina Teyssier & Marie‐Claire Villeval, 2009. "Self‐Selection And The Efficiency Of Tournaments," Economic Inquiry, Western Economic Association International, vol. 47(3), pages 530-548, July.

    More about this item

    Keywords

    effort incentives; contests; reputations; tournaments;
    All these keywords.

    JEL classification:

    • J44 - Labor and Demographic Economics - - Particular Labor Markets - - - Professional Labor Markets and Occupations
    • D83 - Microeconomics - - Information, Knowledge, and Uncertainty - - - Search; Learning; Information and Knowledge; Communication; Belief; Unawareness
    • M51 - Business Administration and Business Economics; Marketing; Accounting; Personnel Economics - - Personnel Economics - - - Firm Employment Decisions; Promotions

    NEP fields

    This paper has been announced in the following NEP Reports:

    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:pra:mprapa:24340. 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.

    If CitEc recognized a bibliographic reference but did not link an item in RePEc to it, you can help with 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: Joachim Winter (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/vfmunde.html .

    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.