This paper analyzes intertemporal effort provision in two-stage tournaments. A principal with a fixed budget for prizes faces two risk-neutral agents. He observes noisy signals of effort in both periods. His goal is to maximize either total efforts (perfect substitutes) or the product of first-...

We conduct a contest experiment where participants can invest in increasing both the mean and the spread of an uncertain performance variable. Subjects are treated with different prize schemes and in accordance with theory we observe substantial investments in spread. We find that both types of...

Alphabetic name ordering on multi-authored academic papers, which is the convention in the economics discipline and various other disciplines, is to the advantage of people whose last name initials are placed early in the alphabet. As it turns out, Professor A, who has been a first author more...

Alphabetic name ordering on multi-authored academic papers, which is the conven-tion in the economics discipline and various other disciplines, is to the advantage of people whose last name initials are placed early in the alphabet. As it turns out, Pro-fessor A, who has been a first author more...

This paper examines three related puzzles: 1) Why do US universities dominate the global rankings? 2) Within US universities, why is Harvard University usually ranked at the top? 3) While most universities take centuries to acquire a global reputation how have many US universities leapfrogged to...