THE OPTIMAL ALLOCATION OF PRIZES IN TOURNAMENTS OF HETEROGENEOUS AGENTS.

Tournaments are widely used in organizations, explicitly or implicitly, to reward the best-performing employees, for example, by promotion or bonuses, and/or to penalize the worst-performing employees, for example, by demotion, withholding bonuses, or unfavorable job assignments. These incentive sch...

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Publicado en:Economic Inquiry Vol. 55; no. 1; pp. 461 - 479
Autores principales: Balafoutas, Loukas, Dutcher, E. Glenn, Lindner, Florian, Ryvkin, Dmitry
Formato: Artículo
Publicado: Wiley-Blackwell Jan2017
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Acceso en línea:Ver este registro en EBSCOhost
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        atl: THE OPTIMAL ALLOCATION OF PRIZES IN TOURNAMENTS OF HETEROGENEOUS AGENTS.
      aug:
        au:
          Balafoutas, Loukas
          Dutcher, E. Glenn
          Lindner, Florian
          Ryvkin, Dmitry
        affil:
          Professor, Department of Public Finance, University of Innsbruck, Innsbruck Austria
          Assistant Professor, Department of Economics, Ohio University, Athens OH 45701
          Assistant Professor, Department of Banking and Finance, University of Innsbruck, Innsbruck Austria
          Assistant Professor, Department of Economics, Florida State University, Tallahassee FL 32306
      su:
        Labor incentives
        Employee reviews
        Performance evaluation
        Tournaments
        Economic research
      sug:
        subj:
          Research and Development in the Social Sciences and Humanities
          Labor incentives
          Employee reviews
          Performance evaluation
          Tournaments
          Economic research
      ab: Tournaments are widely used in organizations, explicitly or implicitly, to reward the best-performing employees, for example, by promotion or bonuses, and/or to penalize the worst-performing employees, for example, by demotion, withholding bonuses, or unfavorable job assignments. These incentive schemes can be interpreted as various prize allocations based on the employees' relative performance. While the optimal prize allocation in tournaments of symmetric agents is relatively well understood, little is known about the impact of the allocation of prizes on the effectiveness of tournament incentive schemes for heterogeneous agents. We show that while multiple prize allocation rules are equivalent when agents are symmetric in their ability, the equivalence is broken in the presence of heterogeneity. Under a wide range of conditions, loser-prize tournaments, that is, tournaments that award a low prize to relatively few bottom performers, are optimal for the firm. The reason is that low-ability agents are discouraged less in such tournaments, as compared to winner-prize tournaments awarding a high prize to few top performers, and hence can be compensated less to meet their participation constraints. ( JEL M52, J33, J24)
      pubtype: Academic Journal
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    language: English
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