Credit attribution and collaborative work

• 成果类型: Article
• 署名作者: Ozerturk, Saltuk; Yildirim, Huseyin
• 署名单位: Southern Methodist University; Duke University
• 刊物名称: JOURNAL OF ECONOMIC THEORY
• ISSN/ISSBN: 0022-0531
• DOI: 10.1016/j.jet.2021.105264
• 发表日期: 2021
• 关键词: Teamwork; collaboration; credit; Project difficulty; Solo work

摘要

We examine incentives in research teams where the market, such as the scientific community, attributes credit for success based on its inference of individual efforts. A social planner who could commit to credit ex ante would induce more effort from higher ability agents in exchange for less credit per unit effort. Lacking such commitment, the Bayesian market assigns credit proportional to perceived effort. This inability to distort credit per unit effort leads to an incentive reversal across projects. For easy projects with a concave marginal cost of effort, in the unique interior equilibrium, higher ability agents work less and receive lower credit/utility, while the opposite holds for difficult projects with a sufficiently convex marginal cost of effort. Moreover, equilibrium may involve over-investment by some team members who expect to receive most of the credit. The incentives to team up and the implications of effort observability on credit attribution are also investigated. (c) 2021 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.