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This paper examines overbidding in contests and the potential of default options (nudges) to reduce expenditures and enhance cooperative behavior. The study is based on an online laboratory experiment (N = 222), using a 2x2 design with two treatment factors: contest type (winner-take-all [WTA] vs. proportional prize [PP]) and the presence or absence of a nudge. Participants were divided into three-person groups and urge to decide how many tokens to invest in intergroup contests. The WTA contest determined the probability of winning the prize based on the relative expenditures of the groups, while the PP contest distributed rewards proportionally. The nudge, introduced in two of the four scenarios, involved setting a default contribution level, allowing for the investigation of its impact on expenditures and coordination. We found that expenditures exceeded the predicted optimal levels across all treatments but decreased over successive rounds. The PP contest with the nudge resulted in the lowest expenditures and least resource wastage, leading to the highest participant payoffs. Even though the WTA contest with the default option showed the highest expenditures, these findings highlight the effectiveness of nudges under this setting in promoting efficient resource use overall and suggest that behavioral interventions can significantly impact expenditure patterns in competitive environments. The research contributes to the broader debate on economic and social interactions, offering insights into strategies for improving resource management and cooperation in both local and global contexts.

The Red Queen's hypothesis portrays evolution as a never-ending competition for expansive energy, where one species' gain is another species' loss. The Red Queen is neutral with respect to body size, implying that neither small nor large species have a universal competitive advantage. Here we ask whether, and if so how, the Red Queen's hypothesis really can accommodate differences in body size. The maximum population growth in ecology clearly depends on body size—the smaller the species, the shorter the generation length, and the faster it can expand given sufficient opportunity. On the other hand, large species are more efficient in energy use due to metabolic scaling and can maintain more biomass with the same energy. The advantage of shorter generation makes a wide range of body sizes competitive, yet large species do not take over. We analytically show that individuals consume energy and reproduce in physiological time, but need to compete for energy in real time. The Red Queen, through adaptive evolution of populations, balances the pressures of real and physiological time. Modeling competition for energy as a proportional prize contest from economics, we further show that Red Queen's zero-sum game can generate unimodal hat-like patterns of species rise and decline that can be neutral in relation to body size.

We consider a two-player contest in which one contestant has a headstart advantage, but both can exert further effort. We allow the prize to depend on total performance in the contest and consider the respective cases in which efforts are productive and destructive of prize value. When the contest success function takes a logit form, and marginal cost is increasing in effort, we show that a Nash equilibrium exists and is unique both in productive and destructive endogenous prize contests. In equilibrium, the underdog expends more resources to win the prize, but still his probability of winning remains below that of the favorite. In a productive contest, the underdog behaves more aggressively and wins the prize more often in comparison to a fixed-value contest. Thus, the degree of competitive balance—defined as the level of uncertainty of the outcome—depends upon the (fixed or endogenous) prize nature of the contest.

While innovation contests and intermediaries are widely used in large companies to source knowledge from the outside, it is not clear how contests could be utilized to break the barriers that SMEs face in pursuing Open Innovation. In this paper, we shed light on the topic by analysing ten innovation contests that have been successfully run in three European countries with the specific aim to create innovation opportunities between SMEs and higher education institutions, research centres, other companies, or end users. The analysis resulted in the identification of common elements that played a crucial role in these innovation contests, but were overlooked in previous research. Moreover, we collected early evidence supporting the case for innovation contests as tools to support Open Innovation policies for SMEs. On that basis, we propose a new framework that can be used by innovation intermediaries to design innovation contests specifically aiming at supporting Open Innovation in SMEs.

Standard legislative bargaining models assume that an agreed-upon allocation is final, whereas in practice there exist mechanisms for challenging passed legislation when there is lack of sufficient consensus. Such mechanisms include popular vote requirements following insufficient majorities in the legislature. This paper analyzes a one-period legislative bargaining game whose outcome can be challenged through a referendum. I study the effects of this institution on the bills passed in the legislature and analyze the incentives it provides for reaching legislative deals. The proposer party’s trade-off between a larger winning prize and a more threatening opponent in the referendum summarizes the bargaining problem. The results indicate that measures of post-bargaining power do not necessarily translate into higher equilibrium payoffs and that the equilibrium bill may include no concessions from the majority to the minority party. Moreover, caps on campaign spending may incentivize a costly referendum over unanimity in the legislature. These results carry policy implications for regulating various forms of post-bargaining power, such as campaign finance laws for referenda.

Outlines the key NZ statutes that include provisions which govern promotions. Touches on whether the law distinguishes between promotions based on entrant skill and promotions based on chance, and on whether it is okay to market a promotion to a database of existing customers rather than advertising it more widely. Source: National Library of New Zealand Te Puna Matauranga o Aotearoa, licensed by the Department of Internal Affairs for re-use under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 New Zealand Licence.