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

Voting rules and efficiency in one-dimensional bargaining games with endogenous protocol

We analyze a rent-seeking contest that determines the bargaining protocol in a onedimensional bargaining game where agents preferences over social outcomes are single-peaked. We relate the incentives of the agents to make unproductive and costly efforts/investments to the quota rules that are required to implement agreements. When the contest assigns persistent recognition probabilities, we find that simple majority reduces the total investments and, hence, inefficiency. In case that the contest recurs each period, multiple equilibria are obtained, with the particularity that only one agent controls the agenda of the bargaining process