Contest in Multitasking: An Evidence from Chinese County Officials' Promotion Assessment

TL;DR

This paper introduces the specialization effect in multi-task contests, demonstrating that competitors focus on their relative advantages and exert more effort across tasks, supported by empirical evidence from Chinese county officials' promotion data.

Contribution

It develops a new theoretical model of multi-task contests with heterogeneous costs and provides empirical evidence of the specialization effect in real-world promotion assessments.

Findings

The specialization effect exists in promotion contests.

Competitors exert more effort in both original and extended tasks.

The model explains behaviors in various multi-task competition scenarios.

Abstract

Real-world observed contests often take the form of multi-task contests rather than single-task contests, and existing theories are insufficient to explain the incentive for extending the task dimension. This paper proposes a new effect of multi-task contests compared to single-tasking contests: the specialization effect (SE). By establishing a multi-task contest model with heterogeneous competitor costs, this paper shows that after expanding the new competition dimension, competitors will choose the dimension with greater relative comparative advantage rather than absolute advantage and pay more effort, which eventually leads to competitors choosing higher effort levels in both the original dimension and the extended dimension. The paper then uses staggered Difference-in-Difference (DID) method on China's county officers' promotion assessment from 2001 to 2022 as an entry point to discuss the empirical evidence for specialization effect. Through models and empirical studies, the specialization effect studied in this paper do exists in promotion assessments, and may also explain many other real-world scenarios, such as sports events, competition between corporate compensation and employee benefits and competition for R&D expenses.