Arbeitspapier
From team spirit to jealousy: the pitfalls of too much transparency
Free riding in team production arises because individual effort is not perfectly observable. It seems natural to suppose that greater transparency would enhance incentives. Therefore, it is puzzling that team production often lacks transparency about individual contributions despite negligible costs for providing such information. We offer a rationale for this by demonstrating that transparency can actually hurt incentives. In the presence of career concerns information on the quality of task execution improves incentives while sustaining a cooperative team spirit. In contrast, making the identity of individual contributors observable induces sabotage behavior that looks like jealousy but arises purely from signal jamming by less successful team members. Our results rationalize the conspicuous lack of transparency in team settings with strong career concerns (e.g., co-authorship, architecture, and patent applications) and contribute to explaining the popularity of group incentive schemes in firms.
- Language
-
Englisch
- Bibliographic citation
-
Series: IZA Discussion Papers ; No. 1661
- Classification
-
Wirtschaft
Asymmetric and Private Information; Mechanism Design
Wages, Compensation, and Labor Costs: General
Transactional Relationships; Contracts and Reputation; Networks
- Subject
-
teams
reputation
transparency
group incentives
sabotage
- Event
-
Geistige Schöpfung
- (who)
-
Koch, Alexander K.
Morgenstern, Albrecht
- Event
-
Veröffentlichung
- (who)
-
Institute for the Study of Labor (IZA)
- (where)
-
Bonn
- (when)
-
2005
- Handle
- Last update
-
10.03.2025, 11:43 AM CET
Data provider
ZBW - Deutsche Zentralbibliothek für Wirtschaftswissenschaften - Leibniz-Informationszentrum Wirtschaft. If you have any questions about the object, please contact the data provider.
Object type
- Arbeitspapier
Associated
- Koch, Alexander K.
- Morgenstern, Albrecht
- Institute for the Study of Labor (IZA)
Time of origin
- 2005
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