We investigate the effects of Partner and Stranger matching in contest experiments and find no difference in the level or distribution of bids across matching protocols. However, demographic and individual strategy effects are different with different matching. Hence, unless one is interested in...

This study analyzes a group contest in which one group (defenders) follows a weakest link whereas the other group (attackers) follows a best-shot impact function. We fully characterize the equilibria and show that with symmetric valuation the equilibrium is unique up to the permutation of the...

Contests are ubiquitous in economic and political settings. Contest designers often use tools to make a contest among asymmetric contestants more even, in order to either elicit higher effort levels, or for ethical reasons. Handicapping - in which stronger participants are a priori weakened - is...

It is observed in neuroscience, economics and psychology experiments that the presence of an image of a pair of eyes may result in higher level of altruistic behavior by subjects. It is hence concluded that the eye-image serves as a `social Êcue'. We test this against an alternative hypothesis...

We study experimentally the effects of cost structure and prize allocation rules on the performance of rent-seeking contests. Most previous studies use a lottery prize rule and linear cost, and find both overbidding relative to the Nash equilibrium prediction and significant variation of...

We investigate the consequences of a pure income effect on the altruistic behavior of donors. Inequality aversion theories predict either no effect or a decrease in giving, whereas impure altruism theory predicts an increase in giving with an increase in the common income of donor and receiver....

We investigate whether a pure framing has any effect on the decisions made in a dictator game. We run a between subject dictator game with a giving and a taking frame whilst keeping the strategy space the same. Complying with the literature we find no overall difference in the amount allocated...

Many contests, such as innovation races or litigation, often involve reimbursement of expenses. This study examines optimal reimbursement schemes in two-player Tullock contests, analyzing four reimbursement structures: external and internal mechanisms targeting the contest winner or loser. We...

We consider a multi-winner nested elimination contest in which losers are sequentially eliminated to attain the set of winners. This is a variant of a widely used mechanism introduced by Clark and Riis (1996) that allows one to select the winners sequentially. We show that the nested elimination...

This article examines behavior in the two-player, constant-sum Colonel Blotto game with asymmetric resources in which players maximize the expected number of battlefields won. The experimental results support all major theoretical predictions. In the auction treatment, where winning a...