We construct a fully specified extensive form game that captures competitive markets with adverse selection. In particular, it allows firms to offer any finite set of contracts, so that cross-subsidization is not ruled out. Moreover, firms can withdraw from the market after initial contract...

Tournaments, reward structures based on rank order, are compared with individual contracts in a model with one risk-neutral principal and many risk-averse agents. Each agents' output is a stochastic function of his effort level plus an additive shock term that is common to all the agents. The...

Game theory makes strong predictions about how individuals should behave in two player, zero sum games. When players follow a mixed strategy, equilibrium payoffs should be equalized across actions, and choices should be serially uncorrelated. Laboratory experiments have generated large and...

The minimax argument represents game theory in its most elegant form: simple but with stark predictions. Although some of these predictions have been met with reasonable success in the field, experimental data have generally not provided results close to the theoretical predictions. In a...

We develop a new approach to dealing with real options problems with uncertain maturity. This type of situation is typical for Ramp;D investments and mine or oil exploration projects. These types of projects are characterized by significant on-going investment costs until completion. Since time...

This paper experimentally investigates the effect of gender-based affirmative action (AA) on performance in the lab, focusing on a tournament environment. The tournament is based on GRE math questions commonly used in graduate school admission, and at which women are known to perform worse on...

We analyze an incentive pay scheme for educators that links educator compensation to the ranks of their students within appropriately defined comparison sets, and we show that under certain conditions this scheme induces teachers to allocate socially optimal levels of effort to all students....

Both private and public organizations constantly grapple with incentive schemes to induce maximum effort from agents. We begin with a theoretical exploration of optimal contest design, focusing on the number of competitors. Our theory reveals a critical link between the distribution of luck and...

Can open tournaments improve the quality of city services? The proliferation of big data makes it possible to use predictive analytics to better target services like hygiene inspections, but city governments rarely have the in-house talent needed for developing prediction algorithms. Cities...

The paper revisits the problem of wage bargaining between a firm and multiple workers. We show that the Subgame Perfect Equilibrium of the extensive-form game proposed by Stole and Zwiebel (1996a) does not imply a profile of wages and profits that coincides with the Shapley values as claimed in...