"Beauty contests" are well-studied, dominance-solvable games that generate two interesting results. First, most behavior does not conform to the unique Nash equilibrium. Second, there is considerable unexplained heterogeneity in behavior. In this work, we evaluate the relationship between beauty...

Contests are meant to attract the best performers and incentivize high effort, however, they may also attract cheaters who try to win via illicit means which crowds out the best performers. We use a laboratory experiment to explore the role of self-selection in contests with a possibility of...

A large number of recent experimental studies show that women are less likely to sort into competitive environments. While part of this effect may be explained by gender differences in risk attitudes and overconfidence, previous studies have attributed the majority of the gender gap to gender...

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...

The research explores the relationship between games and the economic environment in which the games might be embedded. The focus is on a market institution in which agents buy and sell rights to participate in a follow-on stage of strategic interaction. The central question posed concerns how...

In the last decade, forced ranking systems where employees' bonuses depend on their rank assigned by superiors have become less popular. Whereas the inherently competitive structure of ranking systems provides high effort incentives, it might also increase incentives for misconduct. Previous...

There is strong evidence that people exploit their bargaining power in competitive markets but not in bilateral bargaining situations. There is also strong evidence that people exploit free-riding opportunities in voluntary cooperation games. Yet, when they are given the opportunity to punish...

Agents compete to acquire a limited economic opportunity of uncertain pro…tability.Each agent decides how much he acquires public signals before making investmentunder fear of preemption. I show that equilibria have various levels of e¢ ciency undermild competition. The e¤ect of competition...

I develop a dynamic investment game with a "memoryless" R&D process in which an incumbent and an entrant can invest in a new technology, and the entrant can also invest in the old technology. I show that an increase in the probability of successfully implementing a technology can cause the...

We consider a two-player advertising race subject to momentum. Momentum is modelled as a complementarity between current and past campaign spending in a way that is reminiscent of models of addiction and habit formation: the more effective a player's past spending has been, the more effective...