All Out All the Time? Superstars and Incentives on the LPGA Tour

Abstract

Using data from the 1995-2006 LPGA Tour, we analyse players’ response to the presence of Annika Sorenstam, a dominant champion on the LPGA Tour at the time. We find that the measures of players’ responses are highly sensitive to specification. Employing course fixed effects (FEs) greatly reduces the impact Sorenstam had on other golfers. We also find that players do not respond positively to the size of the reward to winning the tournament, which contradicts experimental studies of rank-order tournaments (ROTs). Our findings lead us to question both experimental and non-experimental studies of ROTs and of gender differences in response to them.

Keywords

• Rank-order tournament
• incentives
• Golf
• fixed effects