Existing tests of tournament theory have recently been criticized for their failure to distinguish tournaments from other theories that have similar effects like standards and marginal productivity theory (Gibbs, 1994, 1996; Prendergast, 1999). In this paper, we propose a series of empirical tests...

In this paper we study empirically the labor market of economists. We look at the mobility and promotion patterns of a sample of 1,000 top economists over thirty years and link it to their productivity and other personal characteristics. We find that the probability of promotion and of upward...

We analyze the voting behavior and ratings of judges in a popular song contest held every year in Europe. The dataset makes it possible to analyze the determinants of success, and gives a rare opportunity to run a direct test of vote trading, or logrolling. Though the votes cast may appear as...