We study how the presence of promotion competition in the labor market affects household specialization patterns. By embedding a promotion tournament model in a household setting, we show that specialization can emerge as a consequence of competitive work incentives. This specialization outcome,...

We provide a new theory to explain why firms multitask workers rather than specializing them. Workers over-perform in tasks they like and under-perform in tasks they dislike, to favorably influence future job assignments. Anticipating this, firms may find it optimal to commit to future...

This paper examines "market-based tournaments", in which firms use the tournament outcome to update their expectations about worker ability. A theoretical model offers several implications, which are unique to the market-based tournament and which we test in a laboratory experiment. The...

Players often engage in high-profile public communications to demonstrate their confidence of winning before they carry out actual competitive activities. This paper investigates players' incentives to conduct such pre-contest communication. We assume that a player suffers a cost when he sends a...

We develop a general framework to study contests, containing the well-known models of Tullock (1980) and Lazear & Rosen (1981) as special cases. The contest outcome depends on players' effort and skill, the latter being subject to symmetric uncertainty. The model is tractable, because a...