Competition, Team Motivation and Generativity: Evidence from a School-Based Field Experiment

The experiment consists of two independent trials, and each trial is repeated under four different conditions. The first trial involves running in the gym, while the second consists of a computer-based skill game. Each student will have to complete eight trials, with four different condidations for each trial. The four conditions are designed to differ only in motivational framing and payoff rule, while keeping the task, duration, setting and measurement as similar as possible. The teacher or experimenter reads standardized instructions before each condition. The four conditions are: individual baseline, individual competition, team competition, and charity/generativity.
T1 — Individual baseline
Students complete the task individually. They are told that the objective is to obtain their best personal result. They are not competing against other students and no individual ranking is publicly disclosed. The outcome is the student’s individual performance.
T2 — Individual competition
Students complete the same task and they are told that the objective is to obtain their best result and try to win the individual challenge. The outcome is individual performance.
T3 — Team condition
Students complete the task individually, but their result contributes to the overall score of a team, preferably the class. Students are told that everyone’s contribution matters and that even a small individual improvement can help the team. The outcome is individual performance and team/class performance.
T4 — Charity/generativity condition
Students complete the task individually, but their performance generates a real charitable donation. Students choose among four charitable causes: Kiva, Treedom, Sightsavers, and distance child sponsorship. The donation is real and the aggregate amount generated for each cause is communicated at the end. There is no private individual prize in this condition; the payoff is the donation generated.

2026-05-05

2026-12-15

Primary outcome 1 — Performance improvement relative to baseline
For each student and each task, the primary outcome is the change in performance in each treatment condition relative to the individual baseline condition.
For running tasks, where lower time indicates better performance:
Improvement_it = Time_i,baseline − Time_i,treatment
or normalized as:
Normalized improvement_it = (Time_i,baseline − Time_i,treatment) / Time_i,baseline
For skill-based PC tasks, where higher score indicates better performance:
Improvement_it = Score_i,treatment − Score_i,baseline
or normalized as:
Normalized improvement_it = (Score_i,treatment − Score_i,baseline) / Score_i,baseline
The main comparisons are:
• competition condition vs individual baseline;
• team condition vs individual baseline;
• charity/generativity condition vs individual baseline.

Primary outcome 2 — Absolute performance
Absolute performance will be measured as:
• running time in seconds;
• score obtained in skill-based task.

Primary outcome 3 — Charity amount generated
In the charity/generativity condition, the student’s performance generates a monetary donation according to a pre-specified schedule.

Secondary outcomes include:
1. Whether the student improves relative to baseline.
2. Whether the student wins, loses or ties in the individual competition condition.
3. Team/class-level score in the team condition.
4. Charity selected by the student in the charity/generativity condition.
5. Self-reported competitiveness.
6. Self-reported team orientation.
7. Self-reported prosocial/generative motivation.
8. Risk aversion.
9. Social capital in the class.
10. Heterogeneity by gender, school type, school performance, sport participation, previous volunteering/cooperative experience, and other questionnaire variables.

This is a school-based randomized field experiment using a within-subject design. Each student participates in four comparable task conditions: individual baseline, individual competition, team condition, and charity/generativity condition.
Random assignment is implemented through the random allocation of students to different sequences of the four experimental conditions. In other words, students are not assigned to one fixed treatment or control group for the entire experiment. Instead, all students complete all four conditions, but the order in which they are exposed to the conditions is randomly assigned. This randomization of treatment order is designed to address potential order, fatigue, learning, day, and session effects.
The individual baseline condition serves as the control condition. The individual competition, team, and charity/generativity conditions are the treatment conditions. Since each student participates in all conditions, each student serves as his or her own control, and the main empirical strategy compares within-student changes in performance across conditions.
The core design principle is that the four conditions differ only in motivational framing and payoff rule, not in task difficulty, duration, setting, or measurement.
This design is replicated in two different trials: one in the gym, where students take part in a running test, and another on the computer, where students are engaged in a game designed to measure their skills.
In the individual baseline condition, students perform individually and are not ranked publicly. In the individual competition condition, students compete individually, and their results contribute to their school’s ranking list. In the team condition, students work individually, but their results contribute to their class or team’s score. In the charity/generativity condition, students perform individually and their performance generates a real donation to one of four charitable causes selected by the student: Kiva, Treedom, Sightsavers, or distance child sponsorship. The main empirical strategy compares within-student changes in performance across the four conditions. The preferred specification includes individual fixed effects, treatment-condition indicators, and controls for randomized order, day/session effects, fatigue, and learning. Heterogeneity analyses will test whether treatment effects differ by gender and by baseline characteristics measured in a post-experiment questionnaire.

Not available

The order of the competition, team and charity/generativity conditions will be randomized at the class level. Each participating class will be assigned to one of the possible treatment-order sequences before the start of data collection. The assigned order will be recorded in the dataset.

Student group within class

Yes

1 School and 6 classes;

110 students, divided into 6 classes, will take part in the experiment; 8 different measurements will be taken on each student, making a total of 880 observations.

From the protocol, possible sample sizes are:
• minimum acceptable: 80 students, about 4 classes;
• good target: 110 students;
• optimal target: 150-200 students.