Self-Selection of Peers and Performance

• 成果类型: Article
• 署名作者: Kiessling, Lukas; Radbruch, Jonas; Schaube, Sebastian
• 署名单位: Max Planck Society; IZA Institute Labor Economics
• 刊物名称: MANAGEMENT SCIENCE
• ISSN/ISSBN: 0025-1909
• DOI: 10.1287/mnsc.2021.4267
• 发表日期: 2022
• 页码: 8184-8201
• 关键词: Peer effects; self-selection; Autonomy; framed field experiment

摘要

This paper studies how the presence of peers and different peer assignment rules-self-selection versus random assignment-affect individual performance. Using a framed field experiment, we find that the presence of a randomly assigned peer improves performance by 28% of a standard deviation (SD), whereas self-selecting peers induces an additional 15%-18% SD improvement in performance. Our results document peer effects in multiple characteristics and show that self-selection changes these characteristics. However, a decomposition reveals that variations in the peer composition contribute only little to the performance differences across peer assignment rules. Rather, we find that self-selection has a direct effect on performance.