We conduct an experimental analysis of a best-of-three contest. Intermediate prizes lead to higher efforts, while increasing the role of luck (as opposed to effort) leads to lower efforts. Both intermediate prizes and luck reduce the probability of contest ending in two rounds. The patterns of...

We investigate experimentally the effects of information about native/immigrant identity, and the ability to communicate a self-chosen personal characteristic towards the rival on conflict behavior. In a two-player individual contest with British and Immigrant subjects in the UK we find that...

Contests are commonly used in the workplace to motivate workers, determine promotion, and assign bonuses. Although contests can be very effective at eliciting high effort, they can also lead to inefficient effort expenditure (overbidding). Researchers have proposed various theories to explain...

The standard theoretical description of rent-seeking contests is that of rational individuals or groups engaging in socially inefficient behavior by exerting costly effort. Experimental studies find that the actual efforts of participants are significantly higher than predicted in the models...

We experimentally study behavior in a simple voting game where players have private information about their preferences. With random matching, subjects overwhelmingly follow the dominant strategy to exaggerate their preferences, which leads to inefficiency. Applying a linking mechanism suggested...

We study games played between groups of players, where a given group decides which strategy it will play through a vote by its members. When groups consist of two voting players, our games can also be interpreted as network-formation games. In experiments on Stag Hunt games, we find a stark...

Due to the high costs of conflict both in theory and practice, we examine and experimentally test the conditions under which conflict between asymmetric agents can be resolved. We model conflict as a two-agent rent-seeking contest for an indivisible prize. Before conflict arises, both agents may...

We study the design of a team in multi-team contests.Is it better to distribute prizes among players equally, or to just one player? And is it better to spend a budget on a diverse team with stars and rookies, or on an equal team? First, we study these questions theoretically. We f i nd that...

This paper uses a laboratory experiment to investigate the role of group size in an innovation contest. Subjects compete in a discrete time innovation contest, based on Halac, Kartik, and Liu (2017), where subjects, at the start of each period, are informed of the aggregate number of innovation...

A main goal of affirmative action (AA) policies is to enable disadvantaged groups to compete with their privileged counterparts. Existing theoretical and empirical research documents that incorporating AA can result in both more egalitarian outcomes and higher exerted efforts. However, the...