The outcomes of many activities depend upon both skill and luck. We analyze stock analysts' forecasts of companies' earnings per share under market conditions that vary in volatility and thus imply different levels of luck in outcomes. Noting that making forecasts that deviate widely from the...

We study the gender gap in a competitive environment by exploiting the “naturalistic experiment” of a TV game show with self-selected participants and no gender-specific constraints nor discrimination. Games consist of multiple rounds where contestants answer general knowledge questions...

We study gender differences in exiting competitive environments by exploiting the “naturalistic experiment” of a TV game show where participants were self-selected and there were no gender-specific constraints or discrimination. In multiple rounds, contestants answer general knowledge...

The 'ratchet effect' refers to a situation where a principal uses private information that is revealed by an agent's early actions to the agent's later disadvantage, in a context where binding multi-period contracts are not enforceable. In a simple, context-rich environment, we experimentally...

Male and female choices differ in many economic situations, e.g., on the labor market. This paper considers whether such differences are driven by different attitudes towards competition. In our experiment subjects choose between a tournament and a piece-rate pay scheme before performing a real...

When exogenously imposed, rank-order tournaments have incentive properties but their overall efficiency is reduced by a high variance in performance (Bull, Schotter, and Weigelt 1987). However, since the efficiency of performance-related pay is attributable both to its incentive effect and to...

"We devise an experiment to explore the effect of different degrees of competition on optimal contracts in a hidden-information context. In our benchmark case, each principal is matched with one agent of unknown type. In our second treatment, a principal can select one of three agents, while in...