We report results from the first experimental study of round-robin tournaments. In our experiment, we investigate how the prize structure affects the intensity, fair-ness, and dynamic behavior in sequential round-robin tournaments with three players. We compare tournaments with a second prize...

I characterize the optimal accuracy level r of an unbiased Tullock contest between two players with heterogeneous prize valuations. The designer maximizes the winning probability of the strong player or the winner’s expected valuation by choosing a contest with an all-pay auction equilibrium...

We analyze strategic leaks due to spying out a rival’s bid in a first-price auction. Such leaks induce sequential bidding, complicated by the fact that the spy may be a counterspy who serves the interests of the spied at bidder and reports strategically distorted information. This ambiguity...

We study a symmetric private value auction with signaling, in which the auction outcome is used by an outside observer to infer the bidders’ types. We elicit conditions under which an essentially unique D1 equilibrium bidding function exists in the second-price auction and the English auction....

We study the optimal entry fee in a symmetric private value first-price auction with signaling, in which the participation decisions and the auction outcome are used by an outside observer to infer the bidders’ types. We show that this auction has a unique fully separating equilibrium bidding...

I present a two-player nested contest which is a convex combination of two widely studied contests: the Tullock (lottery) contest and the all-pay auction. A Nash equilibrium exists for all parameters of the nested contest. If and only if the contest is sufficiently asymmetric, then there is an...

This paper studies sabotage in a contest with non-identical players. Unlike previous papers, we consider sabotage in an elimination contest and allow contestants to sabotage a potential or future rival. It turns out that for a certain partition of players there is a pure-strategy equilibrium in...

We investigate whether the simple plurality rule aggregates information efficiently in a large election with three alternatives. The environment is the same as in the Condorcet Jury Theorem (Condorcet (1785)). Voters have common preferences that depend on the unknown state of nature, and they...

We study the relative performance of the first‐price sealed‐bid auction and the second-price sealed‐bid auction in a laboratory experiment where bidders can signal information through their bidding behaviour to an outside observer. We consider two different information settings: the...