We provide new experimental evidence which suggests an asymmetric discouragement effect in lottery contests with heterogeneous abilities. Compared to a symmetric contest, subjects invest less effort when facing a stronger opponent, but they invest the same when facing a weaker opponent. Our...

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...

This paper studies the revelation principle for mechanisms with limited commitment when agents have correlated persistent types over the infinite horizon. After characterizing necessary and sufficient conditions to construct a mechanism with same ex-ante payoffs and interim beliefs to all...

This paper studies a selling mechanism where the seller first charges a fee for advice (information structure) then sells a product. When the buyer has no private information, the seller can extract full surplus, both when the seller has private information and when he doesn't. If only the buyer...

We study strategic investment decisions in multi-stage contests with heterogeneous players. Our theoretical model of a round-robin rank-order tournament predicts that players conserve resources in a current contest to spend more in the subsequent contest if the degree of heterogeneity in the...

This paper points out issues with having behavioral players together with fully rational players in a game. One example of behavioral players is naive or sophisticated players; one can study higher-order beliefs when sophistication is the first-order belief, but the paper also considers...

We investigate overlapping contests in multi-divisional organizations in which an individual's effort simultaneously determines the outcome of several contests on different hierarchical levels. We show that individuals in smaller units are advantaged in the grand (organization-wide) contest for...

We examine the fairness and intensity of sequential round-robin tournaments with multiple prizes. With three symmetric players and two prizes, the tournament is completely fair if and only if the second prize is valued half of the first prize, regardless of whether matches are organized as...

I examine sequential round-robin tournaments with three and four symmetric players. Each player is matched once with each other player. If the matches are organized as Tullock contests (all-pay auctions), the tournament will be almost fair (highly discriminatory): subject to the position of...

This paper studies mechanism design with limited commitment where agents have persistent correlated types over the infinite horizon. The mechanism designer now faces the informed-principal problem in addition to usual issues with i.i.d. types. With an infinite horizon and nondurable good, there...