We examine incentives in research teams where the market, such as the scientific community, attributes credit for success based on its inference of individual efforts. A social planner who could commit to credit ex ante would induce more effort from higher ability agents in exchange for less credit per unit effort. Lacking such commitment, the Bayesian market assigns credit proportional to perceived effort. This inability to distort credit per unit effort leads to an incentive reversal across projects. For “easy” projects with a concave marginal cost of effort, in the unique interior equilibrium, higher ability agents work less and receive lower credit/utility, while the opposite holds for “difficult” projects with a sufficiently convex marginal cost of effort. Moreover, equilibrium may involve over-investment by some team members who expect to receive most of the credit. The incentives to team up and the implications of effort observability on credit attribution are also investigated.

我们研究了科研团队的激励机制，在这些团队中，市场（例如科学界）根据对个人努力的推论，将成功归功于信誉。可以事前相信信用的社会计划者会从能力较高的代理商那里引来更多的努力，以换取每单位努力更少的信用。缺乏这种承诺，贝叶斯市场分配的信用与可感知的努力成比例。无法扭曲每单位工作量的信用会导致整个项目之间的激励逆转。对于具有较低边际工作成本的“简单”项目，在独特的内部均衡中，能力较高的代理人工作较少，获得的信用/效用较低，而对于“困难”项目则具有足够的边际工作成本，反之亦然。而且，平衡可能会涉及一些希望获得大部分信用的团队成员的过度投资。还研究了团队合作的动机以及努力的可观察性对信用归属的影响。