Efficient Tournaments within Teams

Abstract

We analyze incentive problems in team and partnership structures where the only available information to condition a contract on is a partial and noisy ranking which specifies who comes first in efforts among the competing partners. This enables us to ensure both first-best efficient effort levels for all partners and the redistribution of output only among partners. Our efficiency result is obtained for a wide range of cost and production functions. Copyright (c) 2009, RAND.