A Survey of Experimental Research on Contests, All-Pay Auctions and Tournaments

Emmanuel Dechenaux, Dan Kovenock and Roman Sheremeta

Working Papers from Chapman University, Economic Science Institute

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 multibattle 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 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C7 C9 D7 H4 J4 J7 K4 L2 M5 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 99 pages
Date: 2012
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-exp and nep-gth
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (124)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.chapman.edu/research-and-institutions/e ... arch-on-contests.pdf

Related works:
Journal Article: A survey of experimental research on contests, all-pay auctions and tournaments (2015)
Working Paper: A Survey of Experimental Research on Contests, All-Pay Auctions and Tournaments (2014)
Working Paper: A survey of experimental research on contests, all-pay auctions and tournaments (2012)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:chu:wpaper:12-22

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Working Papers from Chapman University, Economic Science Institute Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Megan Luetje ().