Effort Peer Effects in Team Production: Evidence from Professional Football

Abstract

We exploit a unique data set from the Israeli Professional Football Leagues that provides high-frequency direct measures of players’ effort to estimate effort peer effects in a high-skill collaborative team task. Using two complementary identification strategies, we find robust evidence of substantial positive peer effects. Our findings highlight that effort spillovers play an important role in team production and that even a change in just one worker’s effort can substantially influence team effort and thus performance. Moreover, we present suggestive evidence that behavioral considerations are a relevant mechanism for creating peer effects even in highly skilled teams of workers. This paper was accepted by Yan Chen, behavioral economics and decision analysis. Supplemental Material: The data files are available at https://doi.org/10.1287/mnsc.2023.4811 .