Intergalactic Peer Effects: The Role of Teammates in StarCraft 2

Abstract

This paper examines peer effects in the real-time strategy computer game of StarCraft 2 by testing whether the quality of a player's teammates influences that player's ratings improvement over the course of the next two weeks to twelve weeks. The setting is novel within the peer effects literature and provides access to high quality data on player and teammate performance. In our main results, our estimates suggest that having higher quality teammates is associated with a rise in the player's ratings over the next two weeks and that the impact grows as we look further into the future. These peer effects accrue to both players that are better and worse than their teammates, though early on our estimate is slightly larger for the latter group. We also find suggestive evidence that the mechanism through which peers affect a player is through the transmission of general skills.