Publicly provided goods often create differential payoffs due to timely or spatial distances of group members. We design and test a provision mechanism which utilizes rank competition to mitigate free-riding in impure public goods. In our Rank-Order Voluntary Contribution Mechanism...

In this paper we assume that a public project creates different payoffs to different contributors. Within this environment we study two institutions: Rank Order Voluntary Contribution Mechanism (Rank-Order-VCM) and Random Order Voluntary Contribution Mechanism (Random-Order-VCM). In...

We report an experimental test of alternative rules in innovation contests when success may not be feasible and contestants may learn from each other. Following Halac et al. (forthcoming), the contest designer can vary the prize allocation rule from Winner-Take-All in which the first successful...

Tournaments consisting of iterative matches are a common mechanism for determining how to allocate a prize. For this reason it is important to understand the behavioral as well as the theoretical properties of different tournament structures. Given that laboratory experiments have consistently...