This experiment compares the performance of two contest designs: a standard winner-take-all tournament with a single fixed prize, and a novel proportional-payment design in which that same prize is divided among contestants by their share of total achievement. We find that proportional prizes...

In decision problems with absentmindedness the decision maker may manifest time-inconsistent choices in spite of unaltered preferences. In this paper we argue that this can be the case whenever the decision makeris reasoning is not appropriately modeled. More in particular, it is shown that the...

The paper presents the results of a novel experiment testing the effects of environment complexity on strategic behavior, using a centipede game. Behavior in the centipede game has been explained either by appealing to failures of backward induction or by calling for preferences that induce...

Morgan (Public Choice, 116:1-18, 2003) finds that the aggregate effort is greater in sequential than in simultaneous lottery contests. We show that Morgan's result is incorrect due to a slip in a proof, and that the aggregate effort is greater in sequential contests only if contestants are...

The ultimatum heuristic is a decision-making tendency discernible in graphical plots of mixed-motive noncooperative games. As such, it can serve also as a solution approach, backsolving, predicting and explaining outcomes better than the mainstay Nash equilibrium concept whenever data for the...

Revealed preference theory is a powerful tool for testing models of individual choice. It is now being extended to collective choice models as well. In this paper we develop tests for whether play in a game is consistent with equilibrium behavior when preferences are unobserved. We provide...

By a player splitting we mean a mechanism that distributes the information sets of a player among so-called agents. A player splitting is called independent if each path in the game tree contains at most one agent of every player. Following Mertens (1989), a solution is said to have the player...

This paper introduces extensive form generalized games, a general framework for modeling dynamic strategic settings where players' feasible strategies depend on the strategies chosen by others. Extensive form generalized games nest a variety of existing game theoretic frameworks, including games...

We introduce a general class of simplicity standards that vary the foresight abilities required of agents in extensive-form games. Rather than planning for the entire future of a game, agents are presumed to be able to plan only for those histories they view as simple from their current...