@article{146acd0a48154b9ba17e647e1029da47,
title = "The incentive effects of affirmative action in a real-effort tournament",
abstract = "Affirmative action policies bias tournament rules in order to provide equal opportunities to a group of competitors who have a disadvantage they cannot be held responsible for. Its implementation affects the underlying incentive structure which might induce lower performance by participants, and additionally result in a selected pool of tournament winners that is less efficient. In this paper, we study the empirical validity of such concerns in a case where the disadvantage affects capacities to compete. We conducted real-effort tournaments between pairs of children from two similar schools who systematically differed in how much training they received ex-ante on the task at hand. Contrary to the expressed concerns, our results show that the implementation of affirmative action did not result in a significant performance loss for either advantaged or disadvantaged subjects; instead it rather enhanced the performance for a large group of participants. Moreover, affirmative action resulted in a more equitable tournament winner pool where half of the selected tournament winners came from the originally disadvantaged group. Hence, the negative selection effects due to the biased tournament rules were (at least partially) offset by performance enhancing incentive effects.",
keywords = "Affirmative action, Experiment, Real-effort, Sudoku, Tournament",
author = "Caterina Calsamiglia and J{\"o}rg Franke and P. Rey-Biel",
note = "Funding Information: We are especially grateful to Antoni Calv{\'o}-Armengol for his support and encouragement on this project. We thank the editor and two anonymous referees for their insightful comments as well as Jose Apesteguia, Miguel A. Ballester, Carmen Bevi{\'a}, Jeanette Brosig, Antonio Cabrales, Rafael Gralla, Marta Garc{\'i}a-Matos, Maureen Gleeson, Uri Gneezy, Guillaume Haeringer, Nagore Iriberri, In{\'e}s Macho-Stadler, Muriel Niederle, Carmit Segal, Tom Palfrey, Neslihan Uler and seminar audiences at many seminars and conferences. We are deeply grateful to the directors, faculty and administrative personnel at Agora, Aula, Colegio Alem{\'a}n, Emili Juncadella, Pegaso and Sagrado Coraz{\'o}n for their understanding, permission and help with the experiments. We thank Pau Balart, Julen Berasaluce, Ignacio Fern{\'a}ndez, Markus Kinateder, Tomasso Majer, Luca Merlino and Natalia Montinari for their help in running the experiments. Caterina Calsamiglia acknowledges financial support by a Ram{\'o}n y Cajal contract of the Spanish Ministerio de Ciencia y Tecnolog{\'i}a, through the Spanish Plan Nacional I+D+I ( SEJ2005-01481 , SEJ2005-01690 and FEDER), and through the {"}Grupo Consolidado de tipo C{"} ( ECO2008-04756 ), the Generalitat de Catalunya ( SGR2005-00626 ), and the Consolider-Ingenio 2010 ( CSD2006-00016 ) program. J{\"o}rg Franke acknowledges financial support from Ministerio de Educaci{\'o}n y Ciencia ( SEJ2005-01481/ECON ) and FEDER , from Generalitat de Catalunya ( 2005SGR00454 ) and from Universitat Aut{\`o}noma de Barcelona . Pedro Rey-Biel acknowledges financial support from Ministerio de Ciencia y Tecnolog{\'i}a ( ECON2009-07616 ), Ministerio de Educaci{\'o}n ( ECO2012-31962 ), Instituto de la Mujer ( PM610348 ), and from the Generalitat de Catalunya ( 2009SGR-169 ). ",
year = "2013",
month = feb,
doi = "10.1016/j.jpubeco.2012.11.003",
language = "English",
volume = "98",
pages = "15--31",
journal = "Journal of Public Economics",
issn = "0047-2727",
publisher = "Elsevier B.V.",
}