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

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 rankorder 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 multi-battle 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. (author's abstract

An Exploratory Analysis of Fertility Differentials in India

The association between improving economic conditions and declining growth of population has led economists and demographers to hypothesise a direct relationship between indicators of economic development and fertility rates. Using recent National Family Health Survey data and the 1991 Census to explore factors contributing to fertility rates in India, we found that economic variables explain 70 per cent of the interstate variations in India's fertility rates. However, several non-economic variables explain an even greater proportion, for example, indicators of female autonomy explain 84 per cent of the variations. Our analysis demonstrates that to successfully explain Indian fertility rates, models must rely heavily on non-economic variables.census, demographic transition, development indicators, economic development, economics of fertility, household economics, fertility, India, regression,