We investigate the effect of employee heterogeneity on the incentive to put forth effort in a market-based tournament. Employers use the tournament's outcome to estimate employees' abilities and accordingly condition their wage offers. Employees put forth effort, because by doing so they...

This paper examines "market-based tournaments", in which firms use the tournament outcome to update their expectations about worker ability. A theoretical model offers several implications, which are unique to the market-based tournament and which we test in a laboratory experiment. The...