A survey of experimental research on contests, all-pay auctions and tournaments

Many economic, political and social environments can be described as contests in which agents exert costly effort 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...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Experimental economics : a journal of the Economic Science Association 2015-12, Vol.18 (4), p.609-669
Main Authors: Dechenaux, Emmanuel, Kovenock, Dan, Sheremeta, Roman M.
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Auctions
Behavioral/Experimental Economics
Economic models
Economic theory
Economic Theory/Quantitative Economics/Mathematical Methods
Economics
Economics and Finance
Experiments
Externality
Game Theory
Incentives
Lobbying
Microeconomics
Operations Research/Decision Theory
Original Paper
Political economy
Probability
R&D
Rent-seeking
Research & development
Research & development expenditures
Social and Behav. Sciences
Studies
Tournaments & championships
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Summary:Many economic, political and social environments can be described as contests in which agents exert costly effort 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.
ISSN:1386-4157
1573-6938
DOI:10.1007/s10683-014-9421-0