Organizations differ in how they provide feedback that allows individuals to privately compare themselves to their peers. Yet how different feedback designs change effort through the anticipation of peer comparison remains poorly understood. This anticipation activates a competitive motive to outperform peers, and an information motive to shape what individuals infer about their own relative ability. I show theoretically that three standard feedback designs isolate these two motives. In a laboratory experiment, I elicit each participant's effort choice under the three designs. I find that a change in feedback design moves average effort in a way that provides evidence for the existence of both motives. Half of the participants make a different effort choice under at least one of the designs, and among them effort changes substantially. This heterogeneity significantly reorders the resulting ranking. Who ends up at the top therefore depends on a design choice that changes nothing material about the task.
Draft coming soon!
Presented at: PhD Workshop (Naples School of Economics, Scheduled); BID/BEE Seminar (Toulouse School of Economics, Scheduled); ESA (Barcelona, Scheduled); EEA (Dublin, 2026); ASFEE (Lille, 2026); Enter Jamboree (Madrid, 2026); FUR (Alicante, 2026); Job Market Workshop (TSE, 2026); Workshop on Social Economy for Young Economists (Bologna, 2026); BEERS Seminar (GATE-LAB, 2026); BID/BEE Workshop (TSE, 2023–2025); PhD Workshop (TSE, 2024 & 2025).
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.