Competitive situations resembling contests are ubiquitous in modern economic landscape.
In a contest, economic agents expend costly effort to vie for limited prizes, and they are …

We study optimal contest design in situations where the designer can reward high
performance agents with positive prizes and punish low performance agents with negative …

In winner‐take‐all tournaments, agents' performance is determined jointly by effort and luck,
and the top performer is rewarded. We study the impact of the “shape of luck”—the details of …

We study contests in which contestants choose both work effort and the variance of output
(risk). Winner‐take‐all contests generate incentives for contestants to engage in costly risk …

We study Tullock contests with n symmetric players. We show that in a contest without an
exit option, if prizes and punishments (negative prizes) have the same cost, it is optimal for …

Heavy-tailed fluctuations are common in many environments, such as sales of creative and
innovative products or the financial sector. We study how the presence of heavy tails in the …

We utilize a laboratory experiment to compare effort provision under optimal tournament
contracts with different distributions of prizes which motivate agents to compete to be first …

In many social computing applications such as online Q&A forums, the best contribution for
each task receives some high reward, while all remaining contributions receive an identical …

This paper studies a multi-prize imperfectly discriminatory contest with symmetric risk-averse
contestants. Adopting a multi-winner nested Tullock contest model, we first establish the …

This paper studies how promotion tournaments motivate workers to accumulate human
capital when wages are constrained by outside labor markets. Patient firms can retain some …