Research

Although relative performance schemes are known to interact with cooperative attitudes, evidence on how sabotage in competition threaten efficiency from cooperation is almost non-existent. We test experimentally the impact of sabotage activities on cooperation. Participants play a public good game before and after the exposure to a competitive environment, where subjects compete in a all-pay auction with or without the sabotage option. Efficiency decrease by 9% of the initial endowment when observing pre- and post-competition willingness to cooperate. We find no evidence that sabotage in competition further reduces contributions in the public good game played after the tournament, which involves matching participants with perfect strangers. Yet, within the treatment with sabotage, subjects who receive more sabotage cooperate less.

We investigate the impact of donation programs on sustaining cooperation after exposure to a competitive environment. Through an online experiment, we replicate experimental conditions to study the impact of tournament incentives on willingness to cooperate found in Buser and Dreber (2016) and introduce variations in which competition winners can publicly donate to a charity. Our analysis seeks to assess the effectiveness of these donation programs in mitigating the potential negative spillover effects of competition on cooperation and in enhancing organizational efficiency. Our results indicate that competition does not directly impact cooperation, resulting in the replication being unsuccessful. Furthermore, losers of a competition do not react to the donation decisions of winners. Finally, donation decisions made after a competition predict high and low cooperators among winners.