From an employer's perspective a tournament should induce agents to exert productive activities but refrain from destructive ones. We experimentally test the predictive power of a tournament model which suggests that - within a reasonable framework - productive and destructive activities are not...

Optimal rank-order tournaments have traditionally been studied using a first-order approach. The present analysis relies instead on the construction of an "upper envelope" over all incentive compatibility conditions. lt turns out that the first-order approach is not innocuous. For example, in...

Optimal rank-order tournaments have traditionally been studied using a first-order approach. The present analysis relies instead on the construction of an "upper envelope" over all incentive compatibility conditions. It turns out that the first-order approach is not innocuous. For example, in...

This paper provides existence and characterization of the optimal contest success function under the condition that the objective of the contest designer is total effort maximization among n heterogeneous players. Heterogeneity of players makes active participation of a player in equilibrium...

We propose a novel tournament design that incorporates the main properties of a round-robin tournament, a Swiss tournament, and a race. Following an equilibrium analysis, we compare 36 tournament structures inherent in our model and several well-known tournament models from the literature, on...

This paper provides existence and characterization of the optimal contest success function under the condition that the objective of the contest designer is total effort maximization among n heterogeneous players. Heterogeneity of players makes active participation of a player in equilibrium...

We study tournaments where winning a rank-dependent prize requires passing a reserve---a minimum performance standard. Agents' performance is determined by effort and noise. For log-concave noise distributions the optimal reserve is at the modal performance, and the optimal prize scheme is...

This paper investigates the optimal formation of teams in a tournament. A manager sorts four workers---who differ in their productivity---into two teams. Workers on each team join forces to produce team output, and one team wins a prize; e.g., a bonus package. Two sorting patterns are possible:...

This paper investigates the effects of different prize structures on the effort choices of participants in two-stage elimination contests. A format with a single prize is shown to maximize total effort over both stages, but induces low effort in stage 1 and high effort in stage 2. By contrast, a...