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Journal Article
Pedaling Peers: The Effect of Targets on Performance
Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization
Author(s)
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.
Date Published:
2019
Citations:
Baldauf, Markus, Joshua Mollner. 2019. Pedaling Peers: The Effect of Targets on Performance. Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization. 90-103.