Abstract:

This paper reports the results of an experimental study in which competitiveness and cooperation are employed to improve simultaneously teamwork and problem resolution of the university students. These abilities correspond to two basic generic competences in the students’ learning process, which become crucial in their future professional career. The main novelty of our pedagogical tool is the design of a classroom experiment in which students are adequately incentivized to make (individual) decisions with (real) consequences for all members of the same group/team. Teams often suffer from a free-rider problem with respect to individual contributions. Recently, literature of experimental economics shows that putting teams into competition with each other can mitigate this problem. On the other hand, experimental evidence also shows that social information that a member has about the degree of cooperativeness of the other members of the same team influences significantly on his/her level of contribution. In this study, we address both questions with a classroom experiment where members of a team decide how much money to assign to a team account. The total contribution of the team determines its chances of winning a contest (a prize) with another team. In the beginning of the experiment, students are ranked according to their willingness to contribute to a team account, elicited from an initial contribution decision. Then, we form homogeneous teams of three members with similar cooperative preferences. The competition between teams is introduced in such a way that the team with the highest total cooperation level competes with the second-level team, the third-level team compete with the forth-level, and so on. Therefore, we examine the benefit from competition for cooperative behaviour with homogeneous teams which compete with another similar team. Our experimental results provide support for a significant increase in the average cooperation level when between-team competition exists. Moreover, the teams with a lower cooperation level respond to competition doggedly, by contributing more money compared to their behaviour with no competition.

Keywords:

Teamwork competence, experiment.