A vast body of empirical studies lends support to the incentive effects of rank-order tournaments. Evidence comes from experiments in laboratories and non-experimental studies exploiting sports or firm data. Selection of competitors across tournaments may bias these non-experimental studies,...

Breach remedies serve an important role in protecting relationship-specific investments. The theoretical literature predicts that some commonly used types of breach remedies may protect too well, in the sense that they induce over-investment. The driving forces behind this result are the...

Breach remedies serve an important role in protecting relationship-specific investments. Theory predicts that some common remedies protect too well and induce over investment, either though complete insurance against potential separation or the possibility that breach is prevented by increasing...

In this paper we investigate how heterogeneous agents choose among tournaments with different prizes. We show that if the number of agents is sufficiently small, multiple equilibria can arise. Depending on how the prize money is split over the tournaments, these may include, for example, a...

We exploit admission lotteries to estimate the payoffs to the dentistry study in the Netherlands. Using data from up to 22 years after the lottery, we find that in most years after graduation dentists earn around 50,000 Euros more than they would earn in their next-best profession. The payoff is...