Relative performance schemes under non-equilibrium beliefs. Experimental evidence and consequences for the design of tournaments

企业越来越多地面临着这样的挑战：找到有才能的员工，并给予他们正确的激励，让他们留在公司。实现这一目标的一个重要工具是相对绩效计划，在这种计划中，员工的奖金或晋升不是基于一个绝对的目标，而是基于他或她是否是团队中最具生产力的员工。尽管许多理论研究强调了比赛对激励的积极影响，但实验研究提供了一幅不同的画面：参与者对比赛激励的反应截然不同。有些人付出了太多的努力，有些人根本不工作。在公司中也可以观察到这种工作狂和辍学者的分歧，这往往会导致不利的结果，抵消了比赛的积极意图。在这个项目中，我们通过放宽参与者对其他参与者的努力选择具有均衡信念的假设来解释实验结果。有了对参与者行为的更好理解，我们就可以设计新的比赛，在非均衡信念下产生理想的结果。在这个项目中，我们将采用理论和实验方法。

Firms are increasingly facing the challenge to identify talented workers, and to give them the right incentives to stay with the firm. One important instrument to achieve this goal are relative performance schemes where the decision to grant a bonus or to promote the worker is not based on an absolute target but on whether he or she is the most productive worker in the group or not. Although many theoretical studies highlight the positive effects of tournaments on incentives, experimental studies provide a different picture: Participants respond quite differently to tournament incentives. Some provide too much effort, others do not work at all. This bifurcation of workers in workaholics and dropouts can also be observed in firms and it often results in adverse outcomes that countervail the positive intentions of tournaments. In this project we explain the experimental results by relaxing the assumption that participants have equilibrium beliefs about other participants' effort choices. With a better understanding of the participants' behaviour we will then design new tournaments that lead to desirable outcomes under non-equilibrium beliefs. In this project we will employ both theoretical as well as experimental methods.