Costless pre-play communication has been shown to effectively facilitate within-group coordination. However, in 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...

This study provides a unified theoretical and experimental framework in which to compare three canonical types of 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...