Moniker Maladies: When Names Sabotage Success

Moniker maladies: when names sabotage success.

In five studies, we found that people like their names enough to unconsciously pursue consciously avoided outcomes that resemble their names. Baseball players avoid strikeouts, but players whose names begin with the strikeout-signifying letter K strike out more than others (Study 1). All students want As, but students whose names begin with letters associated with poorer performance (C and D) a...

When Sisterly Support Changes to Sabotage

Self - Sabotage ∗

We analyze the incentives of a vertically-integrated producer (VIP) to engage in “self-sabotage”. Self-sabotage occurs when a VIP intentionally increases its upstream costs and/or reduces the quality of its upstream product. We identify conditions under which self-sabotage is profitable for the VIP even though it raises symmetrically the cost of the upstream product to all downstream producers ...

Monsoon maladies.

The advent of monsoon in India provides a welcome relief from the dry hot summer and brings waves of life to parched landscapes across the country, but the cooling showers also bring along a lot of diseases. Infectious diseases like Dengue fever, Chikungunya, Hantaviruses, Nipah virus, Chandipura virus, Malaria and the novel H1N1 influenza virus had emerged or re-emerged as major public health ...

Dynamically Sabotage-Proof Tournaments

This paper explores the consequences of sabotage for the design of incentive contracts. The possibility of sabotage gives rise to a dynamic concern, similar to the Ratchet effect, which distorts the agents’ incentives. We first show that the mere possibility of sabotage may make it impossible to implement the first-best effort, and then offer two distinct incentive schemes, fast track and late ...