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Research Details
Pedaling Peers: The Effect of Targets on Performance, Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization
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. 167: 90-103.
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