Potential, prizes and performance : testing tournament theory with professional tennis data

This paper tests two hypotheses from the theory of elimination tournaments: (i) that uneven tournaments, where the contestants are ex ante heterogeneous, entail lower effort exertion; this is a prediction from agency theory that has not been tested empirically before; and (ii) whether incentives set through prizes matter for effort exertion; this assumption underlies any agency theory about elimination tournaments, and has been empirically tested in other contexts. The evidence obtained with data from professional tennis tournaments supports both the assumption that incentives matter, as well as the theoretical implications concerning uneven tournaments among heterogeneous contestants.

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Year of publication:	2003
Authors:	Sunde, Uwe
Publisher:	Bonn : Institute for the Study of Labor (IZA)
Subject:	Leistungsmotivation \| Wettbewerb \| Leistungsanreiz \| Agency Theory \| Schätzung \| Theorie \| Welt \| Tournament \| elimination tournaments \| uneven tournaments \| incentives in tournaments \| tennis

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Series:	IZA Discussion paper series ; 947
Type of publication:	Book / Working Paper
Type of publication (narrower categories):	Working Paper
Language:	English
Other identifiers:	374930333 [GVK] hdl:10419/20183 [Handle]
Classification:	M12 - Personnel Management ; J33 - Compensation Packages; Payment Methods ; J41 - Contracts: Specific Human Capital, Matching Models, Efficiency Wage Models, and Internal Labor Markets
Source:	EconStor