Work in Progress

• Self-selection into ranking structures: a real-effort experiment.

  in progress with Katharina Huesmann, Daniel Wiesen

  Abstract

  Relative performance information (RPI) is widely used to motivate effort, but two design features remain understudied: the structure of a ranking (how thresholds divide performance into tiers) and whether agents may choose their structure. We propose an online real-effort experiment (cell-identification task) to isolate the total self-selection effect and decompose it into three channels: awareness of alternatives, autonomy to choose, and preference match. We further examine how individual characteristics shape heterogeneous sorting and effort responses, whether self-selection compensates for the motivational gaps left by exogenous assignment, and whether these effects persist across rounds.