An incumbent employee competes against a new hire for bonus or promotion. The incumbent’s ability is commonly known, while that of the new hire is private information. The incumbent is subject to a perceptional bias: His prior about the new hire’s type differs from the true underlying...

We report results from the first experimental study of round-robin tournaments. In our experiment, we investigate how the prize structure affects the intensity, fair-ness, and dynamic behavior in sequential round-robin tournaments with three players. We compare tournaments with a second prize...

We study tournaments where winning a rank-dependent prize requires passing a reserve---a minimum performance standard. Agents' performance is determined by effort and noise. For log-concave noise distributions the optimal reserve is at the modal performance, and the optimal prize scheme is...

We introduce career concerns into rank-order tournaments and offer a novel explanation for the pervasiveness of multiple prizes. We argue that career-concerned individuals, already facing market pressure to perform, will be reluctant to participate in winner-take-all competitions. To entice them...

We generalize Klumpp, Konrad and Solomon's model (KKS Model) to multi-contestant sequential Colonel Blotto Games with prize functions where any contestant's prizes only depend on this contestant's own number of winning rounds. We show that with weakly monotonic prize functions and CSFs...

In many situations, agents take risks by choosing an action that increases their performance immediately, but that potentially leads to a large loss. The current paper studies how such risk-taking behavior depends on the level of competition that the agents face. We study a tournament model and...

Stackelberg equilibrium is a solution concept that describes optimal strategies to commit: Player 1 (the leader ) first commits to a strategy that is publicly announced, then Player 2 (the follower ) plays a best response to the leader’s commitment. We study the problem of computing...

We study elimination tournaments with n stages and 2ⁿ symmetric players. The players have effort budgets that decrease within the stages proportionally to the efforts allocated in the previous stages such that for each effort unit that a player allocates, he loses α (the fatigue parameter)...