Many tournaments take place in the public eye; imbuing the outcomes with signaling value. In this article, the results of an online field experiment on signaling incentives in these public tournaments are presented. In one treatment, tournament outcomes were made available to competitors' peers....

Contests are a historically important and increasingly popular mechanism for encouraging innovation. A central concern in designing innovation contests is how many competitors to admit. Using a unique data set of 9,661 software contests, we provide evidence of two coexisting and opposing forces...

Most of society's innovation systems – academic science, the patent system, open source, etc. – are “open” in the sense that they are designed to facilitate knowledge disclosure among innovators. An essential difference across innovation systems is whether disclosure is of intermediate...