We examine the influence that the degree of stringency in the promotion processes of hierarchical systems has on the outcome of such selections at both the local and global level. We show that any change in the degree of stringency, whether an increase or a decrease, could cause counterintuitive...

This paper analyzes the effect of competition in a dynamic contest in which agents of two types (A and B) differ in their expected performances; environments where type A outperforms type B are more frequent than those where B outperforms A. In each period, the population of agents is randomly...