their efforts. We assume that student preferences are homogeneous over colleges. By modeling college admissions as contests …

four prizes of different size and compare it to "parallel" contests with the same prizes, but where participants have to … same prize. Despite the theoretical predictions, the parallel contests lead to higher efforts for all players, but mainly … by lower-ability players. Division of prizes leads to the predicted effects. In parallel contests, too many players …

comprises of intra - group contests, followed by an inter-group contest in the second stage. Rewards accrue only to the members … the second stage than winners. In contrast to previous frameworks of sequential contests, we show that a prior win may be …