The heterogeneous abilities of players in various competitive contexts often lead to
undesirable outcomes such as low effort provision, a lack of diversity, and inequality. A …

We argue that inter-jurisdictional competition in a regionally decentralized authoritarian
regime distorts local politicians' incentives in resource allocation among firms from their own …

Abstract The “discouragement effect”(DE) is mentioned routinely as a reason for why
heterogeneity is detrimental for incentives in contests. It serves as a theoretical argument for …

We theoretically and experimentally examine the effect of noise variance and prize value on
effort in individual contests and in three types of group contests: perfect-substitutes, best …

This paper studies optimal contest design in contests with noisy performance. Here, contest
design is a team moral hazard problem that endogenizes the assignment rule that maps …

We investigate optimal favoritism using identity-contingent prizes in a two-player Tullock
model. Besides the usual balance effect, prize allocation has an extra efficiency effect: One …

We argue that inter-jurisdictional competition in a regionally decentralized authoritarian
regime distorts local politicians' incentives in resource allocation among firms from their own …

We study how subjects deal with fatigue in a sequence of tournaments that are linked
through fatigue spillovers. We develop a model that allows us to predict the consequences …

We consider two-player contests with the possibility of ties and study the effect of different tie-
breaking rules on effort. For ratio-form and difference-form contests that admit pure-strategy …

We consider contests where participants have private information about their ability and the
contest designer can manipulate the values of different prizes to influence effort. We study …