A Survey of Experimental Research on Contests, All-Pay Auctions and Tournaments
96 Pages Posted: 29 Sep 2012 Last revised: 4 Nov 2012
Date Written: September 28, 2012
Abstract
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 review of experimental research on these three canonical contests. First, we review studies investigating the basic structure of contests, including the contest success function, number of players and prizes, spillovers and externalities, heterogeneity, and incomplete information. Second, we discuss dynamic contests and multi-battle contests. Then we review research on sabotage, feedback, bias, collusion, alliances, and contests between groups, as well as real-effort and field experiments. Finally, we discuss applications of contests to the study of legal systems, political competition, war, conflict avoidance, sales, and charities, and suggest directions for future research.
Keywords: contests, all-pay auctions, tournaments, experiments
JEL Classification: C7, C9, D7, H4, J4, J7, K4, L2, M5
Suggested Citation: Suggested Citation
Do you have a job opening that you would like to promote on SSRN?
Recommended Papers
-
Experimental Comparison of Multi-Stage and One-Stage Contests
-
Self-Selection and the Efficiency of Tournaments
By Tor Eriksson, Sabrina Teyssier, ...
-
Can Groups Solve the Problem of Over-Bidding in Contests?
By Roman M. Sheremeta and Jingjing Zhang
-
The Non-Constant-Sum Colonel Blotto Game
By Brian Roberson and Dmitriy Kvasov
-
Entry into Winner-Take-All and Proportional-Prize Contests: An Experimental Study
By Roman M. Sheremeta, Timothy N. Cason, ...
-
Two-Stage Contests with Budget Constraints: An Experimental Study
By James E. Parco, Wilfred Amaldoss, ...