Sequential teamwork in competitive environments: Theory and evidence from swimming data

Author-Highlights•We model free-riding with sequential contributions and between-team competition.•We find a marked first-mover advantage.•We test these predictions on relay data for swimming competitions.•Controlling for individual ability and endogenous starting order, we find strong evidence that earlier players put less effort than later players.•The extent of free-riding is of meaningful size.

Many tasks require the input by more than one person very often with members of the team contributing sequentially. However, team production is plagued by disincentive problems. We investigate individual incentives to team production with sequential contributions and competing teams. We show that earlier contributors free-ride on team members contributing later on. We test our predictions on sports data using an athlete's performance in the individual race as a natural control for his relay performance. Our empirical findings strongly support the theoretical claims.