Coordination in Teams : A Real Effort-task Experiment with Informal Punishment

Radu Vranceanu (1) , Fouad El Ouardighi (1) , Delphine Dubart (1)

1 ESSEC Business School

This paper reports the results from a real-effort team production experiment, where best performers can impose either tacit or explicit sanctions on their less-performing partners. The behavior of the best performer in the team differs from one condition to another. When explicit sanctions are not allowed, good performers reduce their effort in response to the advantageous difference in scores; when they can impose sanctions, their change in effort is no longer related to the difference in scores. To some extent, a mechanism of explicit sanctions allows good performers to focus on their own performance. Not sanctioning an opponent who under-performs, what we refer to as forgiveness, prompts the latter to improve his performance, but applying the sanction has a stronger effect.

L'article propose une étude expérimentale appliquée au problème du travail d'équipe. La tache consiste à compter le nombre d'occurrences du chiffre 7 dans des blocs de chiffre. Les équipes sont composées de deux joueurs. A chaque tour, le joueur qui fait le meilleur score peut appliquer une sanction à l'autre. Nous étudions les stratégies et les comportements des deux joueurs, dans une interaction qui dure quatre tours.

Mots clés: Team work; performance; experimental economics; punishment

Mots clés: économie experimentale; sanction; Travail d'équipe

Domaines: Gestion et management

Radu Vranceanu, Fouad El Ouardighi, Delphine Dubart. Coordination in Teams : A Real Effort-task Experiment with Informal Punishment. 2013. ⟨hal-00857364⟩