In alpine skiing competitions, one of the coaches of the participating countries sets the course. This may provide an advantage, but it may also exert higher pressure on the racers. We analyze 40,150 men's and 36,968 women's performances from all competitions in alpine skiing's Slalom, Giant...

The order of actions in contests may generate different psychological effects which, in turn, may influence contestants' probabilities to win. The Prouhet-Thue-Morse sequence in which the first 'n' moves is the exact mirror image of the next 'n' moves should theoretically terminate any advantage...

We exploit a natural experiment in which two professionals compete in a one-stage contest without strategic motives and where one contestant has a clear exogenous psychological momentum advantage over the other in order to estimate the causal effect of psychological momentum on performance. We...

We exploit a unique setting in which two professionals compete in a real-life tennis contest with high monetary rewards in order to assess how men and women respond to competitive pressure. Comparing their performance in low-stakes versus high-stakes situations, we find that men consistently...

We study an elimination tournament with heterogenous contestants whose ability is common-knowledge. Each pair-wise match is modeled as an all-pay auction where the winner gets the right to compete at the next round. Equilibrium efforts are in mixed strategies, yielding rather complex play...

We study two-sided markets with a finite numbers of agents on each side, and with two-sided incomplete information. Agents are matched assortatively on the basis of costly signals. A main goal is to identify conditions under which the potential increase in expected output due to assortative...

We study the optimal design of organizations under the assumption that agents in a contest care about their relative position. A judicious definition of status categories can be used by a principal in order to influence the agents' performance. We first consider a pure status case where there...

We use perturbation analysis to study independent private-value all-pay auctions with weakly risk-averse buyers. We show that under weak risk aversion: 1) Buyers with low values bid lower and buyers with high values bid higher than they would bid in the risk neutral case. 2) Buyers with low...