In winner-take-all tournaments, agents' performance is determined jointly by effort and luck, and the top performer is rewarded. We study the impact of the ''shape of luck'' -- the details of the distribution of performance shocks -- on incentives in such settings. We are concerned with the...

We argue that the complex interactions of competitive heterogeneous firms lead to a statistical equilibrium distribution of firms' profit rates, which turns out to be an exponential power (or Subbotin) distribution. Moreover, we construct a diffusion process that has the Subbotin distribution as...

We examine how disclosure policy can be optimally designed to incentivize contestants when their participation is exogenously stochastic. In a generalized Tullock contest setting with two players who are asymmetric in both their values and entry probabilities, we fully characterize the necessary...

We consider a two-player contest model in which breakthroughs arrive according to privately observed Poisson processes. Each player's process continues as long as she exerts costly effort. The player who collects most breakthroughs until a predetermined deadline wins a prize.We derive Nash...