Matteo Richiardi (Universita’ di Torino)

“Rel(a)ying on your team-mates is not enough: On sequential contributions to team production under competition”

abstract

Many tasks require the input by more than one person very often with members of the team contributing sequentially. However, team production is plagued by disincentive problems. In this paper we investigate individual incentives to team production with sequential contributions and competing teams. We show that earlier contributors free-ride on team members contributing later on, with later contributors also providing suboptimal effort. We test our predictions on sports data using an athlete’s performance in the individual race as a natural control for his relay performance. Our empirical findings strongly support the theoretical claims.