Letting down the team?

de Philip S. Babcock

"The NBER Bulletin on Aging and Health provides summaries of publications like this. You can sign up to receive the NBER Bulletin on Aging and Health by email. This paper investigates the effectiveness of incentivizing people in teams versus incentivizing them as individuals. In a field experiment featuring exogenous team-formation and opportunities for repeated social interactions over time, we find that subjects are more apt to attempt an effort-intensive exercise task when they are on a team, even when the expected payout is lower. The main results are driven by inactive types, who exert more effort in team settings and are more likely to accomplish the task, despite the lower expected pay-off. We conclude that social effects in teams exist and can be decisive in motivating effort-intensive tasks"--National Bureau of Economic Research web site.