We study contests in which contestants are homogeneous and have convex effort costs. Increasing contest competitiveness, by making prizes more unequal, scaling up the competition, or adding new contestants, always discourages effort. These results have significant implications: although often...

We consider the situation where a single consumer buys a stream of goods from different sellers over time. The true value of each seller's product to the buyer is initially unknown. Additional information can be gained only by experimentation. For exogeneously given prices the buyer's problem is...

[This item is a preserved copy. To view the original, visit http://econtheory.org/] In a general interdependent preference environment, we characterize when two payoff types can be distinguished by their rationalizable strategic choices without any prior knowledge of their beliefs and higher...