We study career choice when competition for promotion is a contest. A more meritocratic profession always succeeds in attracting the highest ability types, whereas a profession with superior promotion benefits attracts high types only if the hazard rate of the noise in performance evaluation is...

Property rights are undoubtedly among the most important institutions for economic efficiency. Still, by looking at reality we usually see property rights only imperfectly enforced. In this paper we identify uncertainty faced by an enforcer to be sufficient to explain this observation. This...

My dissertation consists of three chapters, all three devoted to incentives in contests and the role of heterogeneity. Chapter 1 characterizes conditions under which introducing multiple prizes in a contest can be used to guarantee efficient incentives for the production of a public good when...

Fear of failure can dominate the choices of individuals. We model its role in the decision to become an entrepreneur and subsequent investments made in pursuit of success using the framework of loss aversion. We show that when an individual's threshold for success is sufficiently high, fear of...

Two common characteristics of populism are anti-elitism and favoring popular will over expertise. The recent successes of populists are often attributed to the common people, the majority of voters, being left behind by mainstream parties. This paper shows that the two characteristics of...

Multiple-prize contests are important in various fields of economics ranging from rent seeking over labour economics, patent and R&D races to tendering for (governmental) projects. Hence it is crucial to understand the incentive effects of multiple prizes on effort investment. This survey...