Competitiveness of Entrepreneurs and Salaried Workers
通过实验测量企业家和受薪员工在私下和公开情境下选择计件工资或锦标赛方案的意愿，发现私下时企业家竞争性较弱，公开时则相反，并探讨了社会规范与信念的作用。
We measure the willingness to compete of entrepreneurs and salaried workers in an experiment. Participants can choose between a piece rate and a tournament scheme in either private or public. We find that in the private condition, entrepreneurs are less competitive than salaried workers, but in the public condition, this ordering is reversed. Survey data suggest that perceived norms of appropriate behavior, along with beliefs about the instrumental value of competitiveness for professional success, can explain why entrepreneurs are more competitive when decisions are publicly observable. We also find that the latter condition improves the quality of experimental decisions. This paper was accepted by Yan Chen, behavioral economics and decision analysis. Funding: Financial support from the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (German Research Foundation) under Germany´s Excellence Strategy [Grant EXC 2126/1–390838866], the University of Cologne through the Hans Kelsen Prize and the Austrian Science Fund through the Special Research Area [Grant SFB F63] is gratefully acknowledged. Supplemental Material: The online appendix and data are available at https://doi.org/10.1287/mnsc.2023.4838 .