Effects Of Affirmative Action On Sabotage In Asymmetric Tournament: The Experimental Evidence

Since1980s, rank order tournaments as competitive compensation mechanismshave become quite popular for providing incentives in employment relationships whichis based on their relative performance rather than absolute performance. Since only theordinal ranking of the agents’ output is decisive for obtaining the winner prize, eachagent could in principle improve his position not only by increasing his own output butalso by exerting destructive effort to decrease the output of competitors. Theasymmetric tournaments research is closer to reality in real life because of person’svariety ability. The asymmetric tournament refers to the asymmetric of the agent, whichmeans the agent own variety ability. When different ability of people compete on thesame stage, it may occur the “Tortoise and the Hare” phenomenon. That means the moreable agents think the chances of less able agents winning are slim, thus reducing theeffort, which cause the failure of the tournament. We can implement affirmative actionfor the less able agents in order to guarantee them get the fair competition opportunities,so the tournament system can be more symmetrical. The affirmative action will giveadvantageous competition environment to the less able agents, but for the more ableagents, it would take certain pressure of competition, so whether it has the effect ontheir sabotage level. Weather more able agent sabotage less able agent more under thecompetitive pressure? Less able agents might feel that their chances of winning thecontest is increase under the protection of affirmative action, if they will sabotage moreable agent more?This paper, under the analysis frame of tournament intends to conduct anexperimental study to solve the above problems. Different from the previous researchmethods, this paper also adopt effort-chosen experiment and real effort experiment twokinds of experiment methods to ensure whether the affirmative action, under theasymmetric tournaments, will influence of the sabotage between the competitors.We come to the following conclusion by carrying out four experiments employing96paid undergraduate and postgraduate student volunteers. To begin with， ineffort-chosen experiment, subjects behavior the slight oversupply of effort and sabotagein all experiments, that is, their mean effort level and sabotage level all remained abovetheir equilibrium level. This suggests that, the competition of between the less and moreable subjects is so fierce, in order to ensure their chances of win, they are only paying efforts and taking “means” continuance. Secondly, in effort-chosen experiments, theimplementation of affirmative action makes the less able subjects reduce the level ofefforts and increase the level of sabotage, but does not change the income; The level ofmore able subjects’ effort increased, but the level of sabotage and incomes are notchange. Thirdly, in real effort experiment, the implementation of affirmative actionmakes the more able subjects increase the level of sabotage, but reduce the income; Thelevel of the less able subjects’ effort and sabotage all increase. Finally, from theemployer perspective, the implementation of affirmative action, can not bring benefitsto the employer, but will more likely to cause discord among agents.In conclusion, for enterprises, affirmative action should be limited. Even if takenspecial “care” to the less able employees, they still can not improve their outputs.Instead, the implementation of affirmative action may increase transaction costs forfirms. From this perspective to consider, when the managers of the enterprise arrangethe position of employees, should try to avoid the more able employees of the“Hare”and the less able employees of “Turtle” competing on the same setting. Theoptimal strategy may be classify different levels of ability of employees, then let thesame type of employees compete each other. In addition, in the work place, creating afair and transparent work atmosphere, will improve the staff’s output and reduce thefriction between employees or employers and employees.