In many situations, agents take risks by choosing an action that increases their performance immediately, but that potentially leads to a large loss. The current paper studies how such risk-taking behavior depends on the level of competition that the agents face. We study a tournament model and...

In many situations, agents take risks by choosing an action that increases their performance immediately, but that potentially leads to a large loss. The current paper studies how such risk-taking behavior depends on the level of competition that the agents face. We study a tournament model and...

We investigate how to strategically motivate sales agents in intermediary markets. In collaboration with a large travel company, we run a field experiment with more than 1, 200 independently owned intermediaries that sell our study firm's own products as well as products from competitors to end...

I analyze how ownership can be structured to minimize the haggling costs due to contractual incompleteness. I model haggling as a contest in which integration gives the integrating party a relative advantage over the integrated party. In a one-period model, this implies that the contest will...

We analyze the consequences of endogenous disclosure of discretionary kind behavior in a two player game with asymmetric information. The first player's choice set, which is his private information, is randomly determined; he can either behave kindly or unkindly towards the second player (kindness...

We investigate how the decision of workers to join a specific type of firm affects their future career opportunities. Workers can either join a very competitive firm (big pond) or a less competitive one (small pond). In a big pond, it is more difficult to advance, but the potential rewards are...

We provide a theoretical analysis of promotion tournaments in which workers 'strategically shirk' by purposely under-performing on tasks that are de-emphasized in a promotion rule, while over-performing in tasks that are emphasized in the rule, thereby increasing their chances of promotion and a...

A contest is a situation in which individuals expend resources in order to win valuable prize(s). 'Sabotage' is a deliberate, and often costly and illegal, act of damaging a rival's likelihood of winning the contest. It is done by exerting resources to negatively influence the effectiveness of a...