How Competition Shapes Peer Effects: Evidence from a University in China

时间：2021年12月22日（周三）上午10：00-11：30

参会方式：线上腾讯会议平台（若有意参会，请发送姓名、学院至18701189960@163.com以获取会议链接，仅限北大师生）

主持人：（国发院）赵耀辉、李玲、刘国恩、雷晓燕、张丹丹
       （经院）秦雪征、石菊、王耀璟、袁野

主讲人：陈思宇  (暨南大学经济与社会研究院)

论文摘要： 

Competition is widely used to increase effort and performance. However, in many domains, performance not only depends on individual effort but also on cooperation between agents. In such cases, competition may decrease individual performance because it can weaken the cooperation between agents as the chance of winning a competition decreases with the success of peers. Education is a natural setting in which help from others can enhance individual performance. Using administrative data from a university in China, this paper examines how competition changes peer effects and peer interactions. We exploit randomly assigned roommates and show that high-ability roommates have slightly detrimental effects on the academic performance of high-ability students. More importantly, we provide novel evidence that negative peer effects significantly increase along various dimensions of competition intensity within dorm rooms. We conducted a survey to investigate potential mechanisms. The survey results reveal that competition discourages help and induces unfriendly behavior among roommates, which might explain our findings. Our study suggests that we cannot consider peer effects to be fixed but rather as being shaped by the competitive nature of the environment.

主讲人简介：

Siyu Chen is an Assistant Professor at the Institute for Economic and Social Research, Jinan University. She received her PhD in Economics from the National University of Singapore in 2019. Her research is in environmental economics and labor economics, with topics including gender gap, peer effects, social networks, green finance, and air pollution management. Her work has been published in the Journal of Environmental Economics and Management, Reginal Science and Urban Economics, Environmental Research, 管理世界，世界经济. Her research is funded by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (NSFC).