We provide evidence of a violation of the informativeness principle whereby lucky successes are overly rewarded. We isolate a quasi-experimental situation where the success of an agent is as good as random. To do so, we use high-quality data on football (soccer) matches and select shots on goal that landed on the goal posts. Using nonscoring shots, taken from a similar location on the pitch, as counterfactuals to scoring shots, we estimate the causal effect of a lucky success (goal) on the evaluation of the player's performance. We find clear evidence that luck is overly influencing managers' decisions and evaluators' ratings. Our results suggest that this phenomenon is likely to be widespread in economic organizations.

In most collective actions, individuals' incentives are not perfectly aligned with the goals of the group/team they are part of. We investigate how individual specific incentives affect both individuals and team leaders' strategies in a natural setting. We use a discontinuity in individual rewards in batsmen scoring in cricket to identify the causal effect of such incentives on behavior. We find that batsmen react to the presence of individual-specific incentives by adopting strategies that may be suboptimal at the team level. More surprisingly, we also find that team captains react to these individual incentives by adopting suboptimal strategies at the team level, which may bring large benefits to the individual players. These results suggest a complex interplay of individual and team incentives which we conjecture may arise in repeated team interactions.