Interesting NBER paper looking at peer effects in the workplace. While fruit pickers, grocery scanners, etc., become more or less productive in correlation with their coworkers skill level, professional golfers play roughly according to their abilities irregardless of their playing partners' skill levels.

Lots of way to look at this, including the obvious one poor play by golf partners has only an indirect effect on me, at best, while poor work by coworkers can have a much more direct effect. that points The subject came up recently in the U.S. Open, where some players were deemed the sort who played you tight at their opponent's skill level, while others played tough all the time, crushing weak opponents while playing better players close. Put differently, I defy any tennis pro to play well against me -- I'm too awful.

This paper uses the random assignment of playing partners in professional golf tournaments to test for peer effects in the workplace. We find no evidence that the ability of playing partners affects the performance of professional golfers, contrary to recent evidence on peer effects in the workplace from laboratory experiments, grocery scanners, and soft-fruit pickers. In our preferred specification, we can rule out peer effects larger than 0.045 strokes for a one stroke increase in playing partners' ability, and the point estimates are small and actually negative.



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