Rivals without a cause? Relative performance feedback creates destructive competition despite aligned incentives

Whether people compete or cooperate with each other has consequences for their own performance and that of organizations. To explain why people compete or cooperate, previous research has focused on two main factors: situational outcome structures and personality types. Here, we propose that—above and beyond these two factors—situational cues, such as the format in which people receive feedback, strongly affect whether they act competitively, cooperatively, or individualistically. Results of a laboratory experiment support our theorizing: After receiving ranking feedback, both students and experienced managers treated group situations with cooperative outcome structures as competitive and were in consequence willing to forgo guaranteed financial gains to pursue a—financially irrelevant—better rank. Conversely, in dilemma situations, feedback based on the joint group outcome led to more cooperation than ranking feedback. Our study contributes to research on competition, cooperation, interdependence theory, forced ranking, and the design of information environments.     

The value of formative investment in organizational federations

Public goods theories highlight an incentive system that rewards ‘free riding’ on the contributions of early contributors toward collective actions. However, because such theories focus on creation of the good, they may underestimate returns that accrue to early contributors subsequent to the good's realization. The concept of formative investment is introduced here to describe the extent to which organizations help to create public goods such as interorganizational linkages like participatory federations. Data from the CEOs of 48 organizations involved in a participatory federation were used to assess how an organization's level of formative investment is related to later patterns of dependency and interaction among federation members. Findings suggest that from a long‐term perspective, and for goods that involve communication and interaction, the incentive structure may not be so favorable for free riders. To the extent that organizations with high formative investment have the capability to envision the future and communicate that vision to potential federation partners, they may be able to both reduce free riding and secure for themselves advantageous positions in the subsequent network of relations.     

Therapeutic Contract Program: preliminary report on a behavioral alternative to the token economy

The token economy has been the primary model for the behavioral management of inpatient populations. However, this basically operant approach seldom emphasizes the development of cognitive-coping skills to help patients more effectively manage stressors that result in hospitalization. The Therapeutic Contract Program (TCP) is described as an inpatient-treatment strategy that is designed to help foster such cognitive-coping and self-control skills. While external structure is provided by components of this program, subprograms of the TCP have as their goal the development of internally-attributed coping skills and self-perceptions of competence. This preliminary report describes the structure of the TCP, as well as planned and in-progress measures of program participation and treatment outcome.     

Integration of stereo and texture cues in the formation of discontinuities during three-dimensional surface interpolation

A series of stereograms are presented which demonstrate that texture boundaries can strongly influence the perception of discontinuities between neighbouring three-dimensional (3-D) surfaces portrayed by means of stereo cues. In these demonstration figures, no stereo information is available in the immediate vicinity of the boundary between the two 3-D stereo surfaces because all texture in that region is removed in one eye's view. On the other hand, various forms of texture boundary information are provided in the resulting monocular region. This stimulus paradigm is used to explore the question: what influence does texture boundary information have on the nature of the perceived 3-D surface that is interpolated between two stimulus regions which carry stereo cues? It is shown that if a clear-cut texture boundary is present in the monocular region then this is used by the human visual system to fix the perceived location of 3-D crease and step surface discontinuities between the stereo regions. Collett (1985) explored this issue with a similar methodology and reported weak and unreliable assistance from monocular texture boundaries in helping shape 3-D stereo surface discontinuities. The strong and robust phenomena demonstrated here seem to rely on two main differences between the present stimuli and those of Collett. In the present stimuli, figurally continuous textures containing strong texture boundaries are used, together with a technique for minimising the complications, including binocular rivalry, that arise from the borders of the stimulus regions present in only one half of each stereogram.