Effects Of Communication On Efforts, Sabotage And Collusion In Team Tournaments: The Method Of Experimental Economics

Tournament mechanism is widely used in Sports events such as FIFA World Cup,National Basketball Association,in promotion system of the enterprises and public government department,as also as the market competitions. With the deepening of specialization,organization of tournament begins transform from person to team. Team is an feasible tool to improve efficiency. It not only makes the employee pay a better efforts, but also more flexible, more responsive than other forms of group. Meanwhile teams have another important role in incentive cooperation: it makes the employee take part in decision-making, enhances the democratic atmosphere, and improves employees' enthusiasm. Team's advantages are largely depends on the effective communication and cooperation between team members. Especially in team tournament mechanism, communication becomes more complex and important, the further discussion and research has an extremely vital significance.In order to enrich the related field of research, this thesis, under the analysis frame of team tournament, intends to conduct an experimental study to test the effects of communication on efforts, sabotage and collusion. Different form previous studies, the agents'profit not only the bonus which the principal provides for the agents, but also relates to the agents'output. By carefully controlled and varied the available communication infrastructure within teams and between competing teams, We are going to present four experiments (no communication,exchange messages with the team,communication between team is possible, but not within teams,exchange messages with all subjects)to test the effects of communication on efforts, sabotage and collusion. The main conclusions of this paper can be indicated that :(1)The subjects'effort levels are higher than the theoretical value in all experiments, especially in test 3 (INTER) subjects'effort levels are far higher than the theoretical value. But the effort levels fluctuate greatly. (2)The effort level in experiments 2(INTAR)is significantly higher than in other three experiments, the second is the experiments 1(NOCOMM)and experiments 4(INTRA+INTER),The experiments 3's effort level is the lowest. Therefore, the efforts to be ordered as follows: INTA≥INTRA+INTER≥NOCOMM≥INTER. We get the conclusions as follows: communication in teams can greatly improves the subjects'efforts, prompting team members to be better cooperation; the communication between teams will reduces the agents' effort level. (3) By analyze the data of sabotage, we find: the sabotage rate in experiments 2 is the highest in all experiments, the experiment 1's sabotage rate is lower than experiments 2, in the experiment 3 and experiment 4,the rate is the lowest, and don't have significant differences. To sum up, communication in team will enhances sabotage behavior, but communication between teams can reduce the rate of sabotage behavior.⑷From the statistics of communication information tables to see, when subjects can exchange messages in team, they are more inclined to choose higher effort levels and more cooperation, the teams as a whole to reply the sabotage behaviors. When subjects can exchange messages between teams, they are like to reach an agreement on sabotage. In other words, communication between teams will increase the collusion. But when subjects can exchange messages each other, the probability of collusion can be reduced. In sum, communication in team increases efforts, prompts cooperation, but it makes subjects are likely to choose sabotage behavior. Communication between teams increases the probability of collusion. Subjects they are like to reach an agreement that they all choose low efforts. So the probability of collusion can be reduced. Generally speaking, enterprise managements or competition organizers should control the communication that encourage the communication in team, and limit the communication between teams. At the same time, in order to encourage employees pay higher effort level, to get a bigger profit, they should take necessary measures to prevent and reduce sabotage and collusion behavior.