In many environments, tournaments can elicit more effort from workers, except perhaps when workers can sabotage each other. Because it is hard to separate effort, ability and output in many real workplace settings, the empirical evidence on the incentive effect of tournaments is thin. There is...

Two experimental treatments are used to study the effects of auction risk across five mechanisms. The first canonical, baseline treatment features only strategic risk and replicates the standard results that overbidding relative to the risk neutral Nash equilibrium is prevalent in all common...