This paper studies an economic contest with identical prizes. We consider the effects of division of the contest. When the contest designer divides the contest symmetrically, each participant competes in each assigned division. The main result is that division is sometimes profitable for the...

We provide a theoretical analysis of promotion tournaments in which workers 'strategically shirk' by purposely under-performing on tasks that are de-emphasized in a promotion rule, while over-performing in tasks that are emphasized in the rule, thereby increasing their chances of promotion and a...

The paper studies the nature, determinants, and impacts of "negative" activities in organizations. In competing for promotion, the members in organizations can work not only to enhance their own performances, but also to "sabotage" their opponents' performances. They find it worthwhile to engage...

The paper studies the nature, determinants, and impact of negative activities in organizations. In competing for promotion, the members in organizations can work not only to enhance their own performances, but also to 'sabotage' their opponent's performances. It is worthwhile for them to engage...

The paper studies the nature, determinants, and impacts of "negative" activities in organizations. In competing for promotion, the members in organizations can work not only to enhance their own performances, but also to "sabotage" their opponents' performances. They find it worthwhile to engage...

In a tournament, agents form coalitions, and the coalition with largest power wins the tournament. We introduce a new solution concept for the tournaments, called no threat equilibrium (NTE). NTE is a partition of the agents, where prudent and farsighted agents have no incentive to deviate....

This paper studies the "negative" activities of members in organizations. In competing for promotion, the members not only can work to enhance their own performances, but can also work to "sabotage" their opponents in order to decrease their performances. They find it worthwhile to engage in...

Rank-order tournaments are usually modeled simultaneously. However, real tournaments are often sequentially. We show that agents' strategic behavior significantly differs in sequential tournaments compared to simultaneous tournaments. In a sequential tournament, under certain conditions the...

This paper provides existence and characterization of the optimal contest success function under the condition that the objective of the contest designer is total effort maximization among n heterogeneous players. Heterogeneity of players makes active participation of a player in equilibrium...