Tournaments are widely used in the economy to organize production and innovation. We study individual data on 2,775 contestants in 755 software algorithm development contests with random assignment. The performance response to added contestants varies non-monotonically across contestants of...

We examine the properties of all-pay contests in the spirit of Moldovanu and Sela (2001) as the number of entrants grows large under organizer objectives of expected and expected maximum outcomes. Unlike the case with a small number of entrants, with a large number of entrants a single prize...