Experimental departures from self-interest when competing partnerships share output
实验研究竞争性产出共享合伙如何降低因负外部性导致的过度努力，发现实际行为系统性地偏离自利假设，更接近社会最优水平，并检验了利他、从众等解释。
Abstract When every individual’s effort imposes negative externalities, self-interested behavior leads to socially excessive effort. To curb these excesses when effort cannot be monitored, competing output-sharing partnerships can form. With the right-sized groups, aggregate effort falls to the socially optimal level. We investigate this theory experimentally and find that while it makes correct qualitative predictions, there are systematic quantitative deviations, always in the direction of the socially optimal investment. Using data on subjects’ conjectures of each other’s behavior we investigate altruism, conformity and extremeness aversion as possible explanations. We show that deviations are consistent with both altruism and conformity (but not extremeness aversion).