We study contests in which contestants are homogeneous and have convex effort costs. Increasing contest competitiveness, by making prizes more unequal, scaling up the competition, or adding new contestants, always discourages effort. These results have significant implications: although often...

Uncompetitive contests for grades, promotions, retention, and job assignments, which feature lax standards and limited candidate pools, are often criticized for being unmeritocratic. We show that, when contestants are strategic, lax standards and exclusivity can make selection more meritocratic....

We study contests where, subject only to a capacity constraint on mean performance, contestants compete for identical prizes by choosing random performance levels. The capacity constraint combined with the rank-contingent rewards makes win-small/lose-big strategies optimal. Equilibrium...

In this document, we demonstrate that the risk-taking contest game studied in "Skewing the odds: Taking risks for rank-based rewards" has no asymmetric equilibria and, hence, the symmetric equilibrium identified there is, in fact, the unique equilibrium.The paper, "Skewing the odds: Taking risks...

In competitions for rank-based rewards, how does the structure of rewards affect risk-taking? We answer this question in a framework where, subject only to a mean-performance constraint, contestants compete for rank-based "prizes" by choosing random performance levels. We derive the unique...

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to investigate how social comparison and motivation to compete account for elevated risk-taking in fund management corroborated by asset market experiments when performance depends on rank-based incentives. Design/methodology/approach: In two laboratory...

We study contests where, subject only to a capacity constraint on mean performance, contestants compete for identical prizes by choosing random performance levels. The capacity constraint combined with the rank-contingent rewards makes winsmall/lose-big strategies optimal. Equilibrium strategies...