The Effect Of Tournament Structure, Interim Performance Feedback, And Unconsciously Prime On Agents’ Behavior: An Experimental Evidence

Tournament has been widely researched as a kind of performance evaluation basedon relative ranking, and used in so many areas such as enterprise employeecompensation and promotion management, patent and R&D competition, public sectorand competition between local officials.This paper investigated how the principal should do can they design a reasonabletournaments structure and information feedback strategy, and the effect ofunconsciously prime to the tournament incentive mechanism.Tournament structure isthe proportion of persons who gain high prizes, and information feedback strategy refersto whether the principal gives agents’ performance ranking information feedback to theagents or not. Unconscious priming theory shows, through starts a goal to the agents inthe unconscious, we can make the agents pursuit this goal, and agents aren’t yet awareof this process.We conduct6real effort experiments, the real task is to reorder poetry, controlvariables respectively for the winning percentage for1/3or2/3, whether there is ainterim performance feedback and positive or negative unconscious priming. We focuson the effect of tournament structure, interim performance information feedback intournament on the agents’ behavior, and under the condition of interim performancefeedback, whether the positive and negative unconscious priming effect on the agentsabotage.By using real effort experimental studies on108subjects, we obtained thefollowing conclusions:①Lower winning percentage can urge agents to improve thelevel of effort and reduce sabotage level, achieving higher levels of performance andcreating more benefit for principals ultimately.②Interim information feedback cannotimprove the effort level of agents effectively, but it can reduce sabotage level of agents,so the agents achieve higher performance levels under the condition of interiminformation feedback. It not only can improve the level of benefit, but also reduce thecost of controlling information flows for principal.③In the case of fewer winners,agents ranked top in last round will suffer more violently sabotage in the next round.However, the low-ranking agents in last round will suffer more sabotage in the nextround in the case of more winning numbers.④After introducing unconscious prime intournament, positive unconscious prime cannot reduce effectively, but negative unconscious can increase the sabotage of agents significantly.⑤the risk preferences andsocial values orientation of agents have influence on their effort and sabotage: agentswho is risk preferences exert more effort and sabotage for wining; Individualism andcompetitive agents choose higher level of sabotage than socialism.In brief, interim information feedback is helpful for organization. Enterprise shouldgive feedback of performance information to employees actively. Enterprises can takedifferent tournament structures based on their purposes. In order to select the mostcapable employees, they can set high winning percentage, and in order to obtain higherefficiency they can set lower winning percentage. When using tournament incentivemechanism, it is better to avoid the influence of negative information on psychologicaland behavioral of employees unconsciously.