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  3. American Economic Review
  4. May 2015
  5. I Take Care of My Own: A Field Study on How Leadership Handles Conflict between Individual and Collective Incentives

I Take Care of My Own: A Field Study on How Leadership Handles Conflict between Individual and Collective Incentives

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Abstract

In most collective actions, individuals' incentives are not perfectly aligned with the goals of the group/team they are part of. We investigate how individual specific incentives affect both individuals and team leaders' strategies in a natural setting. We use a discontinuity in individual rewards in batsmen scoring in cricket to identify the causal effect of such incentives on behavior. We find that batsmen react to the presence of individual-specific incentives by adopting strategies that may be suboptimal at the team level. More surprisingly, we also find that team captains react to these individual incentives by adopting suboptimal strategies at the team level, which may bring large benefits to the individual players. These results suggest a complex interplay of individual and team incentives which we conjecture may arise in repeated team interactions.

Citation

Gauriot, Romain, and Lionel Page. 2015. "I Take Care of My Own: A Field Study on How Leadership Handles Conflict between Individual and Collective Incentives." American Economic Review, 105 (5): 414-19. DOI: 10.1257/aer.p20151019

Additional Materials

JEL Classification

  • C93 Field Experiments
  • D74 Conflict; Conflict Resolution; Alliances; Revolutions
  • L83 Sports; Gambling; Restaurants; Recreation; Tourism
  • Z21 Sports Economics: Industry Studies
  • Z22 Sports Economics: Labor Issues