The standard theoretical description of rent-seeking contests is that of rational individuals or groups engaging in …

Many resource allocation contests have the property that individuals undertake costly actions to appropriate a … potentially divisible resource. We design an experiment to compare individuals’ decisions across three resource allocation … contests which are isomorphic under riskneutrality. The results indicate that in aggregate the single-prize contest generates …

competition: winner-take-all contests won by the best performer, winner-take-all lotteries where probability of success is … proportional to performance, and proportional-prize contests in which rewards are shared in proportion to performance. We introduce …-take-all contests. The lottery contests have the same Nash equilibrium as proportional prizes, but induce contestants to choose higher …

-seeking contests. Most previous studies use a lottery prize rule and linear cost, and ?nd both overbidding relative to the Nash … contribute towards design guidelines for contests based on behavioral principles that take into account implementation features …

equilibrium prediction. These lessons suggest design guidelines for future experiments on contests. …-seeking contests. Most previous studies use a lottery prize rule and linear cost, and find both overdissipation relative to Nash …-equilibrium behavior in contests can be explained by features of the experimental design. These results contribute towards design …

individuals in contests. Our experiment replicates previous findings that individual players significantly overbid relative to …This study reports an experiment that examines whether groups can better comply with theoretical predictions than … individual players. The new findings of our experiment are that groups make 25% lower bids, their bids have lower variance, and …

first stage but not in the second stage. Our experiment provides evidence that winning is a component in a subject’s utility …-dissipation in both contests. It can also explain why the two-stage contest generates higher revenue than the equivalent one …

overbidding in contests. We find that overbidding is significantly higher when subjects are given a large per-experiment endowment …We design an experiment to test if the manner in which subjects receive the endowment has any bearing on the amount of …

This paper experimentally compares the performance of four simultaneous lottery contests: a grand contest, two multiple … grand contest generates the highest effort levels among all simultaneous contests. In multi-prize settings, equal prizes … produce lower efforts than unequal prizes. The results also support the argument that joint contests generate higher efforts …

competitive coordination games, such as rent-seeking contests, better within-group coordination leads to more aggressive … competition and lower efficiency. We report an experiment in which two groups compete in a weakest-link contest by expending …