Abstract
Contests and tournaments are widely used to spur innovation and motivate behavior. At the same time contests have been shown to be prone to strategic behaviors like e.g. sabotage. We investigate two forms of strategic behavior of heterogeneous agents in large contests. Based on a formal model of agent behavior we develop propositions and test these in a dataset of more than 38 million observations of peer-ratings of 74,525 individuals from 511 real world contests over a 10 year period. We find that strategic behaviors might influence the outcome of up to 12\% of contests and that the use is highly ability-dependent: While self-promotion is the dominant form of strategic behavior for low ability agents, high ability agents are both culprits and targets of sabotage. By analyzing three natural experiments we enrich our findings and can exclude alternative explanations.
Original language | English |
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Title of host publication | Proceedings of the Seventy-ninth Annual Meeting of the Academy of Management |
Editors | Guclu Atinc |
Number of pages | 6 |
Place of Publication | Briarcliff Manor, NY |
Publisher | Academy of Management |
Publication date | 2019 |
Pages | 396-401 |
DOIs | |
Publication status | Published - 2019 |
Externally published | Yes |
Event | The Academy of Management Annual Meeting 2019: Understanding the Inclusive Organization - Boston, United States Duration: 9 Aug 2019 → 13 Aug 2019 Conference number: 79 http://aom.org/annualmeeting/ |
Conference
Conference | The Academy of Management Annual Meeting 2019 |
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Number | 79 |
Country/Territory | United States |
City | Boston |
Period | 09/08/2019 → 13/08/2019 |
Internet address |