Costly competitions between economic agents are modeled as contests. Researchers use laboratory experiments to study contests and test comparative static predictions of contest theory. Commonly, researchers find that participants' efforts are significantly higher than predicted by the standard...

This paper studies the optimal design of dynamic research contests. We introduce interim transfers, which are paid in every period while the contest is ongoing, to an otherwise standard setting. We show that a contest where: (i) the principal can stop the contest in any period, (ii) a constant...