Snakes and ladders is an ancient Indian game of chance that offers amusement as well as a metaphor for life's many ups and downs. Games offer useful and fun ways of conveying ideas as well as solution techniques and this game has considerable mathematical tractability. This note shows how snakes...

This paper provides evidence that tournaments motivate analysts to behave boldly and that tournament incentives can be perverse. Controlling for forecast accuracy, analysts making bold forecasts are more likely to win the tournaments measured by moving to prestigious brokerages or being named as...