Without the benefit of studies, the specific analogy to wage labor in this case seems much less useful than the simple fact that if you are getting employees to work more than they would otherwise in hopes of a prize, but only the winner gets the prize, the others are not being compensated for their additional labor, but that matter is framed to them as their loss to the other employee rather than the employer using an antisocial framework to extract extra value from most of the employees at the price of compensating just one of them.
That's not the only relevant point, and the original analogy might have been substantiated in the text, but at base the perversity seems to mainly be offering people a carrot for more labor and then giving only one of them a carrot, it's false-consciousness-building 101.
Without the benefit of studies, the specific analogy to wage labor in this case seems much less useful than the simple fact that if you are getting employees to work more than they would otherwise in hopes of a prize, but only the winner gets the prize, the others are not being compensated for their additional labor, but that matter is framed to them as their loss to the other employee rather than the employer using an antisocial framework to extract extra value from most of the employees at the price of compensating just one of them.
That's not the only relevant point, and the original analogy might have been substantiated in the text, but at base the perversity seems to mainly be offering people a carrot for more labor and then giving only one of them a carrot, it's false-consciousness-building 101.