Creativity Under Fire: The Effects of Competition on Creative Production
研究竞争对个人创意生产的影响，发现适度竞争促使人们产生原创想法，但过度竞争会让他们放弃投入，对管理创意工作者和创新采购有启示。
Though fundamental to innovation and essential to many industries and occupations, individual creativity has received limited attention as an economic behavior and has historically proven difficult to study. This paper studies the incentive effects of competition on individuals' creative production. Using a sample of commercial logo design competitions and a novel, content-based measure of originality, I find that intensifying competition induces agents to produce original, untested ideas over tweaking their earlier work, but heavy competition drives them to stop investing altogether. The results yield lessons for the management of creative workers and the implementation of competitive procurement mechanisms for innovation.