Success breeds success or Pride goes before a fall? Teams and individuals in multi-contest tournaments

We study the impact of progress feedback on players' performance in multi-contest team tournaments, in which team members' efforts are not directly substitutable. In particular, we employ a real-effort laboratory experiment to understand, in a best-of-three tournament, how players' strategic mindsets change when they compete on a team compared to when they compete individually. Our data corroborate the theoretical predictions for teams: Neither a lead nor a lag in the first component contest affects a team's performance in the subsequent contests. In individual tournaments, however, contrary to the theoretical prediction, we observe that leaders perform worse-but laggards perform better-after learning the outcome of the first contest. Our findings offer the first empirical evidence from a controlled laboratory of the impact of progress feedback between team and individual tournaments, and contribute new insights on team incentives. (C) 2015 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.