We study experimentally the effects of sorting in contests between groups of heterogeneous players whose within-group efforts are perfect substitutes. The theory predicts that higher aggregate effort will be reached when variation in ability between groups is lower, i.e., by a more balanced...

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...

Many empirical studies have found a positive association between economic development and democracy survival across countries; however, establishing a causal link between the two with naturally occurring data is problematic. We address this question in a laboratory experiment with democracy...

Overconfidence in one's relative performance within a group is a wide-spread phenomenon. Similar to individual (or within-group) overconfidence, it was also shown that individuals are, on average, overconfident about the performance of their group relative to other groups. We hypothesize that...

We prove the existence of monotone pure strategy Bayesian equilibria in two types of contests between groups under incomplete information: (i) individual-level private information group contests, where each player only knows her own ability, and (ii) group-level private information group...