Jealous Germans Rule

[BaldEagl]

Interesting theory:

https://qz.com/926532/german-fighter-pilots-in-wwii-performed-better-when-they-were-jealous-of-their-colleagues/?utm_source=readnext

[bustr]

The original paper is looking into how to recognize the signs of healthy competitive drive and unhealthy competitive drive in the financial services Industry.


Killer Incentives: Status Competition and Pilot Performance during World War II
Philipp Ager, Leonardo Bursztyn, Hans-Joachim Voth

NBER Working Paper No. 22992
Issued in December 2016
NBER Program(s):   LS   POL

A growing theoretical and empirical literature shows that public recognition can lead employees to exert greater effort. However, status competition is also associated with excessive expenditure on status goods, greater likelihood of bankruptcy, and more risk taking by money managers. This paper examines the effects of recognition and status competition jointly. In particular, we focus on the spillover effects of public recognition on the performance and risk taking of peers. Using newly collected data on monthly “victory” scores of more than 5,000 German pilots during World War II, we find that status competition had important effects: After the German armed forces bulletin mentioned the accomplishments of a particular fighter pilot, his former peers performed considerably better. This outperformance varied across skill groups. When a former squadron peer was mentioned, the best pilots tried harder, scored more, and died no more frequently; in contrast, average pilots won only a few additional victories but died at a significantly higher rate. Hence our results show that the overall efficiency effect of nonfinancial rewards can be ambiguous in settings where both risk and output affect aggregate performance. 

[Shuffler]

I read this paper. It should be said that it has not been confirmed by any peers. It is a working paper.

[shotgunneeley]

New studies suggest they were motivated to impress Ursula Andress...

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Blue_Max

[zack1234]

The RAF pilots were motivated by killing narzzie savages

[OldNitro]

John Wayne, Super trooper, wants to run thru machine gun fire?
May work once or twice, but in the end, he is gonna DIE.
The Audie Murphy example, is NOT the usual results!

Fly until you die, is one of the main reasons the Luftwaffe LOST!
All that experience, of their best pilots, was not passed on!

[PR3D4TOR]

Only U.S. pilots had a finite number of combat missions/hours and then you get to go home for good deal. Both the British and Germans regularly rotated pilots to training units, but British pilots flew until they died too. Tours varied between the main units of the RAF: Fighter Command, Bomber Command and Coastal Command (there were also other areas such as Transport Command and Army Cooperation Command). In Fighter Command, tours were generally judged by flying time rather than number of missions; in 1941 the Air Council issued a general rule that "personnel should be relieved from operational flying after a maximum of 200 hours in one tour". After a tour, pilots would be rotated for six months, typically as an instructor in an OTU (Operational Training Unit), before starting another tour. Very broadly, a typical RAF fighter pilot might rack up 250 - 500 combat missions from 1941 to 1945. If he survived that long.

The Germans had a less formal system, but if an otherwise healthy pilot with many months of action at the front started to lose his "edge" or was judged "fatigued" by his unit MD, he got reassigned to a training unit as an instructor until he was ready to return to combat, which seems to be anything from a couple of months up to a year or so. In 1944 the German system collapsed due to extreme losses and even the flight school staff were sent to the front.

[bustr]

I read this paper. It should be said that it has not been confirmed by any peers. It is a working paper.

Think all the individual actor banking scandals that kept popping up in the news out of the EU right after the crash in 2008. And then the larger scandals that spent very little time in the news like the LIBOR rate rigging with the Bank of England.

This paper is trying to identify and quantify a problem without having to point fingers beyond signalling to the interested parties the research was conducted.

and more risk taking by money managers.