Promotions and Incentives: The Case of Multistage Elimination Tournaments
通过实验室实验，比较两阶段与单阶段淘汰赛中的激励效果，发现参与者在第一阶段会过度努力，超出纳什均衡预测，且这一现象稳健，可能源于有限的前瞻行为和非货币竞争价值。
Promotions play an important role for the provision of incentives in firms. We analyze incentives in multistage elimination tournaments with controlled laboratory experiments. In our two main treatments, we compare a two-stage tournament to a one-stage tournament. Subjects in the two-stage treatment provide excess effort in the first stage, both with respect to Nash predictions and compared to the strategically equivalent one-stage tournament. Additional control treatments confirm that excess effort in early stages is a robust finding and suggest that above-equilibrium effort might be driven by limited degrees of forward-looking behavior and subjects deriving nonmonetary value from competing.