Criminological research consistently demonstrates that approximately 5% of study populations are comprised of pathological offenders who account for a preponderance of antisocial behavior and violent crime. Unfortunately, there have been no nationally representative epidemiological studies...

We study the policy choice of an incumbent politician who is concerned with the public's perception of his capability. The politician decides whether to maintain the status quo or to conduct a risky reform. The success of the reform critically depends on the ability of the politician in oce,...

Purpose Whether lifetime abstainer's antisocial behavior is maladjusted or well-adjusted is unresolved. The aim of this study was to compare abstainers (defined as persons with no lifetime use of alcohol and other drugs and non-engagement in antisocial or delinquent behavior) with non-abstainers...

Players often engage in high-profile public communications to demonstrate their confidence in winning before they carry out actual competitive activities. We investigate players’ incentives to engage in such pre-contest communication. Our key assumption is that a player suffers a cost when he...

This paper studies the optimal design of R&D contests. A “sponsor” (e.g. the US Department of Defense or the World Health Organization) wants to improve the quality of the winning products. To do so, it partitions its budget between two schemes: an inducement prize and efficiency-enhancing...

This paper investigates the competitive effect of cross-shareholdings in winner-take-all all-pay auctions with two asymmetric bidders. We show that cross-shareholdings may paradoxically create a “pro-competitive” effect and elicit more effort than a standard contest without cross-ownership....

This paper investigates whether a contest organizer should disclose private information about bidders’ abilities in a multi-prize all-pay auction. Bidders’ abilities are randomly distributed and observed by the contest organizer; the organizer decides whether to disclose this information...

This paper proposes a multi-prize “reverse” nested lottery contest model, which can be viewed as the “mirror image” of the conventional nested lottery contest of  Clark and Riis (1996a). The reverse-lottery contest model determines winners by selecting losers based on contestants’...

This paper investigates the optimal (effort-maximizing) structure of multi-stage sequential-elimination contests with pooling competition in each stage. We allow the contest organizer to design the contest structure in two arms: contest sequence (the number of stages, and the number of remaining...

This paper studies in a multiple-winner contest setting how the total efforts may vary between a grand contest and a set of subcontests. We first show that the rent-dissipation rate increases when the numbers of contestants and prizes are "scaled up". In other words, the total efforts of a...