IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/bla/scandj/v113y2011i3p729-753.html

Tournaments with Prize‐setting Agents

Author

Listed:
  • Kristoffer W. Eriksen
  • Ola Kvaløy
  • Trond E. Olsen

Abstract

In many tournaments it is the contestants themselves who determine reward allocation. Labor-union members bargain over wage distribution, and many firms allow self-managed teams to freely determine internal resource allocation, incentive structure, and division of labour. We analyze, and test experimentally, a rank-order tournament where heterogenous agents determine the spread between winner prize and looser prize. We investigate the relationship between prize spread, uncertainty (i.e. noise between e¤ort and performance), heterogeneity and effort. The paper challenges well-known results from tournament theory. We find that a large prize spread is associated with low degree of uncertainty and high degree of heterogeneity, and that heterogeneity triggers effort. By and large, our real-effort experiment supports the theoretical predictions.
(This abstract was borrowed from another version of this item.)

Suggested Citation

  • Kristoffer W. Eriksen & Ola Kvaløy & Trond E. Olsen, 2011. "Tournaments with Prize‐setting Agents," Scandinavian Journal of Economics, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 113(3), pages 729-753, September.
  • Handle: RePEc:bla:scandj:v:113:y:2011:i:3:p:729-753
    DOI: j.1467-9442.2011.01654.x
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://hdl.handle.net/10.1111/j.1467-9442.2011.01654.x
    Download Restriction: Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

    File URL: https://libkey.io/j.1467-9442.2011.01654.x?utm_source=ideas
    LibKey link: if access is restricted and if your library uses this service, LibKey will redirect you to where you can use your library subscription to access this item
    ---><---

    As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to look for a different version below or

    for a different version of it.

    Other versions of this item:

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Eriksen, Kristoffer W. & Kvaløy, Ola, 2014. "Myopic risk-taking in tournaments," Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization, Elsevier, vol. 97(C), pages 37-46.
    2. Antonio FILIPPIN & Paolo CROSETTO, 2014. "A Reconsideration of Gender Differences in Risk Attitudes," Departmental Working Papers 2014-01, Department of Economics, Management and Quantitative Methods at Università degli Studi di Milano.
    3. Graff, Frederik & Grund, Christian & Harbring, Christine, 2021. "Competing on the Holodeck - The effect of virtual peers and heterogeneity in dynamic tournaments," Journal of Behavioral and Experimental Economics (formerly The Journal of Socio-Economics), Elsevier, vol. 90(C).
    4. Eriksen, Kristoffer W & Kvaløy, Ola, 2015. "2015/01 No guts, no glory: An experiment on excessive risk-taking by Kristoffer W. Eriksen and Ola Kvaløy," UiS Working Papers in Economics and Finance 2015/1, University of Stavanger.
    5. Martin Grossmann, 2021. "Correction to: Entry regulations and optimal prize allocation in parallel contests," Review of Economic Design, Springer;Society for Economic Design, vol. 25(4), pages 317-318, December.

    More about this item

    JEL classification:

    • C30 - Mathematical and Quantitative Methods - - Multiple or Simultaneous Equation Models; Multiple Variables - - - General

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:bla:scandj:v:113:y:2011:i:3:p:729-753. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Wiley Content Delivery (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/journal/10.1111/(ISSN)1467-9442 .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.