We provide a tractable model of competition in rank-order contests with general prize structures. A leading example of such a situation is the competition between fund managers whose compensation depends on how well they performed relative to their peers. We analyze their trading behavior In a...

We study learning and information acquisition by a Bayesian agent who is misspecified in the sense that his prior belief assigns probability zero to the true state of the world. In our model, at each instant the agent takes an action and observes the corresponding payoff, which is the sum of the...

This paper introduces a class of contest models in which each player decides when to stop a privately observed Brownian motion with drift and incurs costs depending on his stopping time. The player who stops his process at the highest value wins a prize. Potential applications include job...

This paper presents a strategic model of risk-taking behavior in the framework of a continuous time contest. Formally, we analyze a dynamic game in which each player decides when to stop a privately observed Brownian Motion with drift. Only the player who stops his process at the highest value...

We model the joint distribution of choice probabilities and decision times in binary decisions as the solution to a problem of optimal sequential sampling, where the agent is uncertain of the utility of each action and pays a constant cost per unit time for gathering information. We show that...

We consider the optimal taxation of a good which exhibits a negative externality, in a setting where agents differ in their value for the good, their disutility for the externality and their value for money, and the planner observes neither. Pigouvian taxation is the unique Pareto efficient...