Do Tournaments Have Incentive Effects?
利用职业高尔夫锦标赛的非实验数据，检验奖金水平和结构是否影响球员表现，结果支持锦标赛具有激励效应的命题。
Much attention has been devoted to studying models of tournaments or situations in which an individual's payment depends only on his or her output or rank relative to that of other competitors. Under certain sets of assumptions, tournaments have desirable normative properties because of the incentive structures they provide. Our paper uses nonexperimental data to test whether tournaments actually elicit effort responses. We focus on professional golf tournaments because information on the incentive structure (prize distribution) and measures of individual output (players' scores) are both available. We find string support for the proposition that the level and structure of prizes in PGA tournaments influence players performance. Copyright 1990 by University of Chicago Press.