In a contest players compete for winning a prize by effort and thereby increasing their probability of winning. Contestants, however, could also improve their own relative position by harming the other players. We experimentally analyze contests with heterogeneous agents who may individually...

This paper reports an experiment on a location game, the so-called "Price-Competition on the Circle." There are n symmetric firms equidistantly located on a circle. Consumers are uniformly distributed. Each consumer buys one and only one unit from that firm whose price, including the cost of...

In a contest players compete for winning a prize by effort and thereby increasing their probability of winning. Contestants, however, could also improve their own relative position by harming the other players. We experimentally analyze contests with heterogeneous agents who may individually...

This paper reports an experiment on a location game, the so-called "Price-Competition on the Circle." There are n symmetric firms equidistantly located on a circle. Consumers are uniformly distributed. Each consumer buys one and only one unit from that firm whose price, including the cost of...

In corporate contests, employees compete for a prize. Ideally, contests induce employees to exert productive effort which increases their probability of winning. In many environments, however, employees can also improve their own ranking position by harming their colleagues. Such negative...

We conducted an experimental study of price competition in a duopolistic market. The market was operationalized as a repeated game between two “teams” with one, two, or three players in each team. Each player simultaneously demanded a price, and the team whose total asking price was smaller...

Experimental sealed-bid first-price auctions with private values in which feedback on the losing bids is provided yield lower revenues than auctions where this feedback is not given. The concept of weighted impulse balance equilibrium, which is based on a principle of ex post rationality and...

Two players bargain over the allocation of a sum of money. They are only incompletely informed about the opponent's alternative in case of conflict. The paper investigates two different experimental approaches: the spontaneous behavior of subjects in a game playing experiment and the strategies...

Recently there has been much theoretical and experimental work on learning in games. However, learning usually means "learning about the strategic behavior of opponents" rather than "learning about the game" as such. In contrast, here we report on an experiment designed to test whether players...

We introduce a generalized theoretical approach to study imitation models and subject the models to rigorous experimental testing. In our theoretical analysis we find that the different predictions of previous imitation models are due to different informational assumptions, not to different...