Social comparison is pervasive. People care about how they rank relative to others, but why does anticipated ranking affect effort when it is not payoff relevant? I show that two distinct motives are at play. The first is a preference for outperforming peers, which generates a “will to win.” The second is a preference over beliefs about one’s own relative productivity, which creates a “will to shape beliefs” by using effort to influence what future rank feedback reveals about productivity rank. I develop a theory that delivers a clean identifying restriction and guides the design of a real-effort experiment that separately identifies and quantifies these motives. I further show that heterogeneity in these motives can fundamentally reshape observed performance rankings.
Draft coming soon!
I study how excuses affect motivation and reputation dynamics. I develop a dynamic model in which agents choose between a costly action and a privately beneficial one, care about their reputation for being non-opportunistic, and may face stochastic constraints that force them to take the privately beneficial action. When excuses do not exist, strategic agents may take the costly action at all times to preserve their reputation and can pool with intrinsically motivated types indefinitely. When excuses do exist, strategic agents optimally exploit excuse-driven uncertainty to avoid the costly action even when it is feasible, leading to full type revelation in the long run. The analysis shows that excuses weaken reputational incentives while increasing the long-run informativeness of observed behavior.