Prize Structure and Information in Tournaments: Experimental Evidence

By Richard B. Freeman, Alexander M. Gelber. 2008

115 citations recorded by the source corpus.

This paper examines behavior in a tournament in which we vary the tournament prize structure and the information available about participants' skill at the task of solving mazes. The number of solved mazes is lowest when payments are independent of performance; higher when a single, large prize is given; and highest when multiple, differentiated prizes are given. This result is strongest when we inform participants about the number of mazes they and others solved in a pre-tournament round. Some participants reported that they solved more mazes than they actually solved, and this misreporting also peaked with multiple differentiated prizes.

Subfields: Economics and Econometrics, General Decision Sciences, Safety Research

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/bf706965ccfbf7629d7873ac24d4c670b0c03df1

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Citations in the corpus

Entry into Winner-Take-All and Proportional-Prize Contests: An Experimental Study (2010, background): “One of their predictions is tested in a mazesolving contest by Freeman and Gelber (2010), who find that the multiple-prize structure does result in higher aggregate performance than the winner-take-all payment.4 This paper studies a new type of tournament: a proportional-prize contest, in which…”
Employee Recognition and Performance: A Field Experiment (2016, background): “…Iriberri, 2010; Tran and Zeckhauser, 2012), contributions to an online community (Chen et al., 2010), real-effort in the lab (Charness et al., 2012; Freeman and Gelber, 2010; Kuhnen and Tymula, 2012), to workers’ performance in a real working environment (Falk and Ichino, 2006; Delfgaauw et al.,…”
A survey of experimental research on contests, all-pay auctions and tournaments (2014, background): “Fullerton et al. (1999) find substantial support for the model’s comparative statics predictions, indicating that subjects optimally choose to participate in research contests by employing effort expenditures that are influenced by the number of contestants, the value of the prize and the cost of ef”
Fairness and cheating (2012, background): “In the experimental tournament of Freeman and Gelber (2010), subjects cheated by misreporting”
Field experiments in labor economics (2010, methodology): “features in a way consistent with theory, using data either from experimental settings (Bull et al., 1987; Nalbantian and Schotter, 1997; Eriksson et al., 2008a,b; Freeman and Gelber, 2008), personnel data (Knoeber and Thurman, 1994;”
Best-of-Three Contest Experiments: Strategic versus Psychological Momentum (2012, unknown): “An alternative design choice would be to use “real effort” such as solving mazes (Freeman and Gelber, 2010), optimization problems (van Dijk et al.”