In many contest situations, such as R&D competition and rent seeking, participants’ costs are private information. We report the results of an experimental study of bidding in contests under different information and symmetry conditions about players’ costs of effort. The theory predicts...

Contests between groups of workers are often used to create incentives in organizations. Managers can sort workers into groups in various ways in order to maximize total output. We explore how the optimal sorting of workers by ability in such environments depends on the degree of effort...

Individuals belonging to a social group make judgments about their relative standing within the group as well as about the relative standing of their group among other groups. On average, individuals exhibit overconfidence bias in both types of judgments in a variety of settings. We hypothesize,...