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识别有才能的员工，并给予他们正确的激励以留在公司的挑战。实现这一目标的一个重要手段是相对业绩计划，在这种计划中，发放奖金或提升工人的决定不是基于绝对目标，而是基于他或她是否是小组中生产力最高的工人。虽然许多理论研究强调了锦标赛对激励的积极影响，但实验研究提供了不同的图景：参与者对锦标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。工作狂和辍学工人的这种分歧也可以在公司中观察到，它往往导致不利的结果，抵消了锦标赛的积极意图。在这个项目中，我们解释了实验结果放松的假设，参与者对其他参与者的努力选择的均衡信念。随着对参与者行为的更好理解，我们将设计新的锦标赛，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.