We present a new experimental design that permits us to explore gender differences in both performance and compensation choice. We design a game in which participants are asked to choose between a flat wage and a tournament scheme and to perform under each scheme. Our data indicate that men and...

Scholars traditionally claim that unanimity rule is more capable of producing Pareto optimal outcomes than majority rule. Dougherty and Edward (Public Choice 151(3):655–678, <CitationRef CitationID="CR16">2012</CitationRef>) make the opposite claim assuming proposals are either random, sincere, or strategic. We test these competing...</citationref>

We consider a class of dynamic tournaments in which two contestants are faced with a choice between two courses of action. The first is a riskless option (“hold”) of maintaining the resources the contestant already has accumulated in her turn and ceding the initiative to her rival. The...

In many contest situations, such as R&D competition and rent seeking, participants’ costs are private information. We report the results of an experimental study of bidding in contests under different information and symmetry conditions about players’ costs of effort. The theory predicts...