In a contest players compete for winning a prize by effort and thereby increasing their probability of winning. Contestants, however, could also improve their own relative position by harming the other players. We experimentally analyze contests with heterogeneous agents who may individually...

In the economic literature on market competition, firms are often modeled as single decision makers and the internal organization of the firm is neglected (unitary player assumption). However, as the literature on strategic delegation suggests, one can not generally expect that the behavior of...

Rank-order tournaments are usually modeled simultaneously. However, real tournaments are often sequential. We show that agents’ strategic behavior in sequential-move tournaments significantly differ from the one in simultaneous-move tournaments: In a sequential-move tournament with...

In their seminal paper, Harrington and Hess (1996) discuss a model where candidates differ along two dimensions - ideology which is modeled by the standard Hotelling-Downs formulation and valence factors which encompass traits which all voters agree as desirable. While valence factor is given,...

The existence of a linear equilibrium in Kyle's model of market making with multiple, symmetrically informed strategic traders is implied for any number of strategic traders if the joint distribution of the underlying exogenous random variables is elliptical. The reverse implication has been...

In standard auctions with symmetric, independent private value bidders resale creates a role for a speculator - a bidder who is commonly known to have no use value for the good on sale. For second-price and English auctions the efficient value-bidding equilibrium coexists with a continuum of...

Myopic loss aversion (MLA) has been established as one prominent explanation for the equity premium puzzle. In this paper we address two issues related to the effects of MLA on risky investment decisions. First, we assess the relative impact of feedback frequency and investment flexibility (via...

In this paper we analyze the frequently observed phenomenon that (i) some members of a team (“black sheep”) exhibit behavior disliked by other (honest) team members, who (ii) nevertheless refrain from reporting such misbehavior to the authorities (they set up a “wall of silence”). Much...

We develop an equilibrium directed search model of the labor market where workers can simultaneously apply for multiple jobs. The main result is that all equilibria exhibit wage dispersion despite the fact that workers and firms are homogeneous. Wage dispersion is driven by the simultaneity of...