Sequential-elimination career games promote survival-of-the-fittest competitors. However, top prizes must be elevated to provide performance incentives in later stages of the game. The option value of achieving a high rank encourages performance effort in early rounds, but the continuation...

Committees improve decisions by pooling members' independent information, but promote manipulation, obfuscation, and exaggeration of private information when members have conflicting preferences. Committee decision procedures transform continuous data into ordered ranks through voting. This...

The authors use a two-period matching model with initial uncertainty about productivities of participants to analyze incentives for early contracting or unraveling. Unraveling provides insurance in the absence of complete markets but causes inefficient assignments. Unraveling is more likely the...