The means of contest design may include differential taxation of the prize. This paper establishes that, given a revenue-maximizing contest designer who faces a balanced-budget constraint, the optimal taxation scheme corresponding to an all-pay auction is appealing in two senses. First, it...

Contest or auction designers who want to maximize the overall revenue are frequently concerned with a trade-off between contest homogeneity and inclusion of contestants with high valuations. In our experimental study, we find that it is not profitable to exclude the most able contestant in favor...

We compare, on the basis of a procedurally fair provision point mechanism, bids for a public project from which some gain and some lose with bids for a less efficient public project from which all gain. In the main treatment, participants independently decide which one, if any, of the public...

Empirically, social dilemma under information asymmetry are often much less pronounced than theory predicts. Traders experience a winner's curse and maintain efficiency enhancing exchange of commodities when theory predicts none. Especially under competition, cursed parties undergo severe losses...

The winner's curse is a well-known deviation from rational self-interest in decision-making under asymmetric information. Yet, most prominent explanations for the curse have experimentally been ruled out so far. In particular, the curse did neither seem to emanate from a lack of experience with...

Bidding rules that guarantee procedural fairness may induce more equilibrium bidding and moderate other-regarding concerns. In our experiment, we assume commonly known true values and only two bidders to implement a best-case scenario for other-regarding concerns. The two-by-two factorial design...

We investigate the emergence of discrimination in an experiment where individuals affiliated to different groups compete for a monetary prize, submitting independent bids to an auctioneer. The auctioneer receives perfect information about the bids (i.e. there is no statistical discrimination),...

We find clear demographic and ability effects on bidding in common value auctions: inexperienced women are much more susceptible to the winner's curse than men, controlling for SAT/ACT scores and college major; economics and business majors substantially overbid relative to other majors; and...

Starting with an initial price vector, prices are adjusted in order to eliminate the demand excess and at the same time to keep the transfers to the sellers as low as possible. In each step of the auction, to which sellers should those transfers be made (minimal overdemanded sets) is the key...

An uncovered bargaining solution is a bargaining solution for which there exists a complete and strict relation (tournament) such that, for each feasible set, the bargaining solution set coincides with the uncovered set of the tournament. We provide a characterization of a class of uncovered...