In e-commerce platforms, consumers rely heavily on product reviews, sales volume, and number of product page visits to infer product quality. The past decade witnessed an explosive growth of seller-initiated quality misrepresentation by using fake reviews, fake sales volume, and fake clicks to...

In this paper we examine the possibilities a principal in a public organization has to motivate agents for productivity improvements where standard stick and carrot incentives cannot be used. The principal's only incentive device is a reallocation of budgets and tasks across agents depending on...

A major challenge for marketers is how to spend a marketing budget such that the impact on a target market is maximized. There are numerous organizations including marketing agencies, media experts and sales agents that promise to deliver more impact for the money a firm allocates to marketing....

In this paper I contrast the impact of precision, i.e., the level of accuracy with which workers' performance is assessed, on wage costs in U- and J-type tournaments. In U-type tournaments prizes are fixed. In J-type tournaments only an overall wage sum is specified. The principal can increase...

I study the design of sequential tournaments in which one agent makes his effort choice after observing the other agent's decision. In case the two agents are homogeneous and both risk-neutral, sequential tournaments are identical to simultaneous tournaments w.r. to prizes and effort...

By the well established tournament literature, incomplete information regarding the employees' productivity is essential for the rationalization of (efficiency-enhancing) tournaments. In this paper we propose an alternative rationalization of tournaments focusing on a fully informed principal...