We study a model of imperfectly discriminating contests with two ex ante symmetric agents. We consider four institutional settings: Contestants move either sequentially or simultaneously and in addition their types are either public or private information. We find that an effort-maximizing...

We consider two-stage tournaments with different information structures: Either competitors observe each others’ first-stage effort before entering the second stage or not. In laboratory experiments, we observe that subjects adjust their effort to the effort information (if available): While...

In this paper, we show that moderate overconfidence in a contest can improve the agent's performance relative to an unbiased opponent and even lead to an advantage in absolute terms.