Journal Article

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

Dechenaux, Emmanuel, Sheremeta, Roman M., Kovenock, Dan

2015

Overview

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.

• Publisher: Springer US,Springer Nature B.V
• Subject: Auctions / Behavioral/Experimental Economics / Contests / Economic models / Economic theory / Economic Theory/Quantitative Economics/Mathematical Methods / Economics / Economics and Finance / Experiments / Externality / Feedback / Game Theory / Incentives / Lobbying / Microeconomics / Operations Research/Decision Theory / Original Paper / Political economy / Polls & surveys / Probability / R&D / Rent-seeking / Research & development / Research & development expenditures / Social and Behav. Sciences / Spillover effect / Studies / Tournaments / Tournaments & championships