. -- complementarities ; heterogeneous workers ; production technology ; tournament …

: incentive provision and selection. Our theoretical analysis reveals a trade-off for the tournament designer between the two … goals: While total effort is maximized if less heterogeneous participants compete against each other early in the tournament … tournament designer. These findings have important implications for the optimal design of promotion tournaments in organizations …

assignments. We use a principal-agent model to compare the efficiency of two tournament incentive schemes, reward tournament and … punishment tournament, which, respectively, reward the best performer and punish the worst performer. We show that while the two … constraints. Hence, our results predict that firms using punishment tournament contracts will perform better. -- tournament …

-order tournament. Perceived entitlements are sensitive to how hard an agent has worked relative to her rival, and agents are loss … averse around their meritocratically determined endogenous reference points. In a fair tournament sufficiently large desert … average. In an unfair tournament, where one agent is advantaged, the equilibrium is symmetric in the absence of desert, but …

This experiment compares the performance of two contest designs: a standard winner-take-all tournament with a single …-take-all tournament. The proportional-prize contest performs better by limiting the degree to which heterogeneity among contestants …

We run a field experiment to investigate whether competing in rank-order tournaments with different prize spreads … affects individual performance. Our experiment involved students from an Italian University who took an intermediate exam in …