ABSTRACT

The inclination of individuals to improve their performance when it lags behind that of others with whom they naturally compare themselves can be harnessed to optimize the individuals’ effort in work and study. In a given set of individuals, we characterize each individual by his relative deprivation, which measures by how much the individual trails behind other individuals in the set doing better than him. We seek to divide the set into an exogenously predetermined number of groups (subsets) in order to maximize aggregate relative deprivation, so as to ensure that the incentive for the individuals to work or study harder because of unfavorable comparison with others is at its strongest. We find that the solution to this problem depends only on the individuals’ ordinally measured levels of performance independent of the performance of comparators.

摘要

当个人不愿与自己自然地比较自己的他人相提并论时，可以利用个人的意愿来提高他们的绩效，从而优化个人在工作和学习上的努力。在给定的一组个人中，我们通过每个人的相对剥夺来表征每个人的相对剥夺，该相对剥夺衡量的是个人在该集合中落后于其他个人的程度比他更好。我们试图将集合划分为外在预定的组（子集），以最大程度地增加总体相对剥夺，以确保因与他人不利的比较而使个人更努力工作或学习的动机最大。我们发现该问题的解决方案仅取决于个人通常测量的性能水平，而与比较器的性能无关。