Using data on team assignment and weekly output for all weavers in an urban Chinese textilefirm between April 2003 and March 2004, this paper studies a) how randomly assignedteammates affect an individual worker’s behavior under a tournament-style incentive scheme,and b) how such effects...

During the 1930s and 1940s, collective bargaining emerged as the workplace governancenorm in much of the U.S. industrial sector. Following its peak in the 1950s, union density inthe U.S. private sector fell steadily, to only 7.4 percent in 2006. Governance shifted from aformalized union norm to...