This paper addresses the question of how bureaucratic incentives affect economic performance in China at the provincial level. This paper develops a novel model to measure promotion incentives of the Chinese provincial standing committee members from 1995 to 2015. Using machine learning...

We introduce career concerns into rank-order tournaments and offer a novel explanation for the pervasiveness of multiple prizes. We argue that career-concerned individuals, already facing market pressure to perform, will be reluctant to participate in winner-take-all competitions. To entice them...

In an asymmetric tournament model with endogenous risk choice by the agents it is shown that equilibrium efforts decrease (increase) with risk if abilities are sufficiently similar (different). Risk also affects winning probabilities. The interaction of both effects is analyzed.