This article examines the relationship between works councils and the closure of manufacturing establishments in Germany. The relationship varies according to circumstances and type of establishment. For the subsample of single-establishment firms, the estimates show that works council presence...

We study gender differences in the impacts of competition and subjective feedback, using an online game with pop-up texts and graphics as treatments. We define 8 groups: players see a Top 10 leaderboard or not (competitiveness), and within these, they receive no feedback, supportive feedback,...

We study the impact of the gender composition of a scoreboard on the persistence and performance of players in an online game. Players were randomly selected into eight groups, defined along two dimensions: they saw high or average scores on a scoreboard (score level), and within each of these,...

In this paper, we investigate individuals' investment in status in an environment where no monetary return can possibly be derived from reaching a better relative position. We use a real-effort experiment in which we permit individuals to learn and potentially improve their status (rank). We...

This article examines the relationship between works councils and the closure of manufacturing establishments in Germany. The relationship varies according to circumstances and type of establishment. For the subsample of single-establishment firms, the estimates show that works council presence...

Models of job tournaments and competitive workplaces more generally predict that while individual effort may increase as competition intensifies between workers, the incentive for workers to cooperate with each other diminishes. We report on a field experiment conducted with workers from a...

Economic globalization is often considered to be one of the main causes of recent changes in the workplace and the way in which organizations manage their human resources. Nevertheless, an empirical study putting this claim to the test by relating the internationalization of the economy to the...

We study strategic investment decisions in multi-stage contests with heterogeneous players. Our theoretical model of a round-robin rank-order tournament predicts that players conserve resources in a current contest to spend more in the subsequent contest if the degree of heterogeneity in the...

This paper experimentally tests the relation between subjects' competitiveness and bargaining behavior. Bargaining is investigated in a demand-ultimatum game, where the responder can request a share of the pie from the proposer. The results show that highly competitive proposers earn less, since...

We study how workers' concern for coworkers' ability (CfCA) affects competition in the labor market. We consider two firms offering nonlinear contracts to a unit mass of prospective workers. Firms may differ in their marginal productivity, while workers are heterogeneous in their ability (high...