On the Role of Group Size in Tournaments: Theory and Evidence from Lab and Field Experiments

List, John A.; Soest, Daan van; Stoop, Jan; Zhou, Haiwen

doi:10.3386/w20008

Cited by 20 publications

(19 citation statements)

References 24 publications

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“…List et al (2014) investigate the effect of the number of players under different distributions of noise. They design three treatments in which, depending on the noise distribution, a risk-neutral contestant's effort should decrease, increase or remain the same.…”

Section: Number Of Playersmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…A policy which marginally biases tournament rules in favor of inexperienced students reduces performance of experienced subjects, while significantly increasing the chances of inexperienced subjects to win the tournament. List et al (2014) conduct both a laboratory and a field experiment to study how the number of contestants impacts individual efforts in tournaments. The field experiment uses nonprofessional fishermen as subjects.…”

Section: Field Experimentsmentioning

confidence: 99%

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A Survey of Experimental Research on Contests, All-Pay Auctions and Tournaments

2012

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Many economic, political and social environments can be described as contests in which agents exert costly efforts while competing over the distribution of a scarce resource. These environments have been studied using Tullock contests, all-pay auctions and rank-order tournaments. This survey provides a comprehensive review of experimental research on these three canonical contests. First, we review studies investigating the basic structure of contests, including the number of players and prizes, spillovers and externalities, heterogeneity, risk and incomplete information. Second, we discuss dynamic contests and multi-battle contests. Then we review studies examining sabotage, feedback, bias, collusion, alliances, group contests and gender, as well as field experiments. Finally, we discuss applications of contests and suggest directions for future research. IntroductionMany economic, political and social environments can be described as contests in which competing agents have the opportunity to expend scarce resources -such as effort, money, time, or troops -in order to affect the probabilities of winning prizes. Examples range from the competition for mates, college admission, patents, or promotions within firms, to the process of litigation or lobbying politicians, to elections, sports competitions, and violent global conflicts (Tullock, 1967;Krueger, 1974). As is obvious from this list, these environments have attracted considerable attention in applications in a wide range of fields, both in-and out-side of economics. They have also been studied extensively by economic theorists in what has become known as the field of contest theory (Konrad, 2009). Although this field continues to attract many young theorists, it has its roots in three models developed in the mid-seventies to early eighties: the Tullock (1980) model of rent-seeking, the Lazear and Rosen (1981) rank-order tournament model, and the all-pay auction (Hirshleifer and Riley, 1978;Nalebuff and Stiglitz, 1983;Dasgupta, 1986;Hillman and Riley, 1989). Despite the fact that the three models historically developed somewhat independently, they represent special cases of a general contest model that can be formulated in a unified framework.Despite an extensive and established theoretical literature, much less effort has been devoted to empirically investigate individual behavior in different contests and compare such behavior with theoretical predictions. The main reason is that it is not trivial to measure individual effort in the field since the researcher can only observe the performance of contestants, which is a function of effort, ability and luck (Ericsson and Charness, 1994). The majority of empirical studies use either firm level data (Prendergast, 1999) or sports data (Szymanski, 2003). Because it is typically difficult to measure the actual effort expended by players in the field, almost all of these studies focus solely on investigating whether the pattern of outcomes is consistent with the theoretical predictions.Controlled experimen...

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Section: Number Of Playersmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Field Experimentsmentioning

confidence: 99%

A Survey of Experimental Research on Contests, All-Pay Auctions and Tournaments

2012

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“…The U‐shaped cost function with a minimum at some “regular” effort level is analogous to the inverted‐U‐shaped utility described in List et al. (), with a maximum at some “regular” effort level (see footnote 21, p. 8). Definition Worker j strategically shirks on task i in period t by choosing

e_{i t}^{j} < 0

.…”

Section: The Strategic Shirking Problemmentioning

confidence: 91%

Strategic Shirking: A Theoretical Analysis of Multitasking and Specialization

DeVaro

Gürtler

2016

Int Economic Review

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We provide a new theory to explain why firms multitask workers instead of specializing them. Workers overperform in tasks they like and underperform in tasks they dislike to favorably influence future job assignments. Anticipating this, firms may find it optimal to commit to future multitasking to induce workers to appropriately allocate effort early in the employment relationship. We show that when the product market is volatile, so that future product prices are uncertain, the firm's ability to credibly commit to a multitasking strategy diminishes. This generates a negative relationship between multitasking and product market volatility, consistent with recent empirical evidence.

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“…Generally, empirical studies find support for the main predictions of the theory, such as the incentive effect (Knoeber, 1989;Ehrenberg and Bognanno, 1990;Becker and Huselid, 1992;Knoeber and Thurman, 1994), the size effect (Boudreau et al, 2011;List et al, 2014), and the discouragement effect (Brown, 2011;Berger and Nieken, 2016).…”

Section: Contestmentioning

confidence: 99%

War and conflict in economics: Theories, applications, and recent trends

Kimbrough

Laughren

Sheremeta

2020

Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization

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We review the main economic models of war and conflict. These models vary in details, but their implications are qualitatively consistent, highlighting key commonalities across a variety of conflict settings. Recent empirical literature, employing both laboratory and field data, in many cases confirms the basic implications of conflict theory. However, this literature also presents important challenges to the way economists traditionally model conflict. We finish our review by suggesting ways to address these challenges.JEL classifications: D72, D74, F51, F52, F54, H56, N4, Q34

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On the Role of Group Size in Tournaments: Theory and Evidence from Lab and Field Experiments

Cited by 20 publications

References 24 publications

A Survey of Experimental Research on Contests, All-Pay Auctions and Tournaments

A Survey of Experimental Research on Contests, All-Pay Auctions and Tournaments

Strategic Shirking: A Theoretical Analysis of Multitasking and Specialization

War and conflict in economics: Theories, applications, and recent trends

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