Research Details

Abstract

Individuals facing competitive targets increase their effort but respond non-monotonically to the target’s difficulty. We use a novel dataset of informal amateur cycling competitions to track the responses of individuals to competitively-set targets (in the form of displacement from the top of a leaderboard). Modeling the choice problem of these individuals, we derive a set of testable hypotheses. We find, as predicted by the model, that individuals compete sooner and more intensely after displacement. As our main result, we find an inverted-U relationship between the increase in effort and the size of the displacement.

Type

Article

Author(s)

Markus Baldauf, Joshua Mollner

Date Published

2019

Citations

Baldauf, Markus, and Joshua Mollner. 2019. Pedaling Peers: The Effect of Targets on Performance. Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization.: 90-103.