Tournaments are commonly used in the workplace to determine promotion, assign bonuses, and motivate personal development. Tournament-based contracts can be very effective in eliciting high effort, often outperforming other compensation contracts, but they can also have negative consequences for...

This experiment compares the performance of two contest designs: a standard winner-take-all tournament with a single fixed prize, and a novel proportional-payment design in which that same prize is divided among contestants by their share of total achievement. We find that proportional prizes...

Contests are well-established mechanisms for encouraging innovation, incentivizing workers, and advancing R&D. A well-known theoretical result in the contest literature is that greater heterogeneity decreases performance of contestants because of the “discouragement effect.” Leveling the...

This study provides a unified framework to compare three canonical types of contests: winner-take-all contests won by the best performer, winner-take-all lotteries where probability of success is proportional to performance, and proportional-prize contests in which rewards are shared in...