The paper presents experimental evidence on the impact of managers and their incentives on the behavior of group members in intergroup contests. I find that members follow the nonbinding investment recommendations of their group manager in particular if the managers payoff does not depend on the...

We study communication in committees selecting one of two alternatives when consensus is required and agents have private information about their preferences. Delaying the decision is costly, so a form of multiplayer war of attrition emerges. Waiting allows voters to express the intensity of...

In models of non-deterministic contest, players exert irreversible effort in order to increase their probability of winning a prize. The most prominent functional form of the win probability in the literature is the so-called "logitʺ contest success function. We provide a simple...

In contest models with symmetric valuations, equilibrium payoffs are positive shares of the value of the prize. In contrast to a bargaining situation, these shares sum to less than one because a share of the value is lost due to rent-dissipation. We ask: can every such division into payoff...

Tug-of-war is a multi-battle contest often used to describe extended interactions in economics, management, political science, and other disciplines. While there has been some theoretical work, there is scant empirical evidence regarding behavior in a tug-of-war game. To the best of our...

This paper studies a contest in which players with unobservable types may form an alliance in a pre-stage of the game to join their forces and compete for a prize. We characterize the pure strategy equilibria of this game of incomplete information. We show that if the formation of an alliance is...

The literature on imperfectly discriminating contests has almost exclusively focused on complete information. We study such contests assuming players have private information. We identify a general class of imperfectly discriminating contests for which findings by Athey (2001) imply the...

We consider a variant of the Tullock lottery contest. Each player's constant marginal cost of effort is drawn from a potentially different continuous distribution. In order to study the impact of incomplete information we compare three informational settings to each other: players are either...