This paper proposes the Stochastic-Share Contest, a novel contest format that combines the Winner-Take-All Contest and the Proportional-Prize Contest, with the former nesting the latter two as special cases. Motivated by the experimental contest literature, we include risk aversion and a "joy of...

We use a laboratory experiment to study the effects of disclosing the number of active participants in contests with endogenous entry. At the first stage potential participants decide whether to enter competition, and at the second stage entrants choose their investments. In a 2×2 design, we...

In this paper, we ask a fundamental design question in the theory of contests: Should contestants and reward money be pooled into a single grand contest, or should they be divided into parallel subcontests? We theoretically explore optimal divisioning using Tullock’s lottery contest framework...