Under optimal tournament design, we would expect agents to exert identical effort regardless of the shape of the contest function’s error component. We report data from laboratory experiments that provide a first test of this prediction. We find that efforts do not significantly differ when...

Under optimal tournament design, we would expect agents to exert identical effort regardless of the shape of the contest function’s error component. We report data from laboratory experiments that provide a first test of this prediction. We find that efforts do not significantly differ when...