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

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Abstract

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.

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Notes

  1. Our survey is comprehensive, so we tried to include all experimental papers on contests which were available in 2012. We used Google Scholar, RePEc, and SSRN to locate most of the published as well as working papers. Then, we sent an e-mail to the ESA Google Group requesting additional working papers that we could not locate in our original search.

  2. Whether this correlation comes from non-pecuniary benefits from winning or other sources demands further research. For instance, it may be the case that subjects who make errors in assessing their bidding strategies for a prize of value zero also are likely to make errors in bidding for higher value prizes. At the same time, it may well be the case that the non-pecuniary benefits from winning are not invariant to the monetary value of the prize.

  3. Early treatments of special cases of all-pay auctions include Hirshleifer and Riley (1978), Nalebuff and Stiglitz (1983) and Dasgupta (1986).

  4. In the symmetric complete information all-pay auction with a continuous strategy space and n = 4, there is a continuum of asymmetric Nash equilibria in which one or two players place probability mass at 0. Hence, a significant incidence of zero bids may be consistent with behavior in asymmetric equilibria.

  5. An important advantage of rank-order tournaments over alternative compensation schemes is that tournament incentives are not affected by common shocks (random noise that impacts all players equally), since common shocks do not change the relative ranking of players’ efforts (Wu and Roe 2005; Wu et al. 2006; Agranov and Tergiman 2013). As a result of filtering common shocks, tournaments reduce agents’ risk exposure, making them more attractive than other compensation schemes. Wu and Roe (2005) and Wu et al. (2006) show both theoretically and experimentally that in the presence of common shocks tournaments outperform fixed performance contracts and piece-rates by eliciting higher efforts.

  6. Freeman and Gelber (2010) conduct an experimental test of Moldovanu and Sela (2001) based on a real-effort experiment. They find that subjects’ performance is higher when multiple prizes are offered than when a single prize is offered.

  7. Shared contests have also been studied by Masiliunas et al. (2012), Fallucchi et al. (2013), Shupp et al. (2013), and Chowdhury et al. (2014).

  8. In two-player all-pay auctions, Dechenaux and Mancini (2008) find that low-valuation players behave more aggressively than in Noussair and Silver’s (2006) six-player auctions, suggesting that this finding does not prevail in smaller auctions.

  9. Using a real-effort experiment, Gill and Prowse (2012) study a sequential-move tournament in which the second mover observes the first mover’s performance before choosing how much effort to expend. The results of the experiment provide evidence of a discouragement effect: second movers decrease their effort after observing a high effort by the first movers.

  10. The first experimental study of a competitive environment resembling a war of attrition is Phillips and Mason (1997). However, in the dynamic Cournot game they analyze, players do not choose the time at which they wish to exit. Rather, a player remains in the game until he is forced to exit when his cumulative profit falls to zero.

  11. The static volunteer’s dilemma is a simultaneous move game in which each of n players has two actions, “volunteer” and “not volunteer”. Any player who volunteers incurs a cost, c. If at least one player volunteers then all players receive an identical prize, v. If none of the players volunteer, then all players earn a payoff of zero. If v − c > 0, the game has multiple Nash equilibria, including pure strategy equilibria in which one player volunteers and n − 1 players do not volunteer, as well as a symmetric equilibrium in non-degenerate mixed strategies. Diekmann (1985, 1986) experimentally studies symmetric games and the effect of the number of players on the probability of volunteering, and finds that a player’s likelihood of volunteering is decreasing in the number of players. Diekmann (1993) experimentally studies an asymmetric version of the game where players differ in their cost of volunteering, and finds that the players with the lowest cost of volunteering are more likely to volunteer.

  12. The experiment by Otsubo and Rapoport (2008) also implements a finite horizon, complete information war of attrition (framed as a dynamic volunteer’s dilemma), but focuses on symmetric players.

  13. In a recent paper, Caldara (2012) examines complete information common value pay-to-bid auctions, which resemble wars of attrition.

  14. Irfanoglu et al. (2014) also investigate a best-of-three contest and compare its performance with a static contest. Mago and Sheremeta (2014) examine the best-of-three contest modeled as an all-pay auction. Their results are qualitatively similar to the findings of Mago et al. (2013).

  15. The above studies provide evidence on behavior in races where opportunities for cooperation are nonexistent. Silipo (2005) sets up an experiment to examine the incentives for cooperation that may arise before the start of a patent race or emerge during its course. His model is based on Fudenberg et al. (1983) but allows for collusion. Silipo employs a three-by-two design that varies the degree of asymmetry in starting positions and the value of the prize. He observes rather high rates of cooperation, but mostly when the players are symmetric. With asymmetries, in the sense that one of the subjects has a head start in the race, cooperation does not emerge as often. Furthermore, when the prize value is low, any cooperation typically breaks down as contestants approach the finish line. Like the Harris and Vickers models, Fudenberg et al.’s (1983) model exhibits the property that once a player has established a sufficient lead, this player makes all the investment while the laggard gives up. For duopolies that do not cooperate, Silipo does find evidence that points to such a discouragement effect.

  16. An early study of a contest in which effort from previous stages is carried over to later periods is Sbriglia and Hey’s (1994) real-task experiment.

  17. In multi-stage contests, with or without carryover, the discount rate that players apply to future payoffs affects the intertemporal allocation of effort. Deck and Jahedi’s (2014) experiment seeks to test whether individual contestants discount future gains and whether they strategically anticipate that others also discount future payoffs.

  18. Chark et al. (2011) study two-stage elimination lottery contests with large group sizes, no binding constraints, and groups that are of unequal sizes. Qualitatively, their results are similar to Parco et al. (2005) and Amaldoss and Rapoport (2009), although Chark et al. find little evidence for over-expenditure in the first stage.

  19. Baye and Hoppe (2003) show that the innovation tournament is strategically equivalent to a Tullock contest with an endogenous prize.

  20. Recently, the Colonel Blotto game became available on Facebook, known as Project Waterloo (Kohli et al. 2012).

  21. An exception is Fallucchi et al. (2013) who investigate the role of information feedback in a chosen-effort lottery contest and find that additional feedback about rivals’ efforts reduces aggregate effort. One notable difference is that Fallucchi et al.’s experiment lasts for 60 periods, while Mago et al.’s experiment lasts only for 20 periods.

  22. Filippin and Guala (2013) show that subjects in the role of a principal choose to discriminate in favor of their in-group members even when all contestants are symmetric and exert the same efforts.

  23. In a related experiment with sabotage, Harbring and Irlenbusch (2008) fail to replicate the finding that two-player contests are prone to collusive behavior.

  24. In a related study, Leibbrandt and Saaksvuori (2012) document similar results in contests between groups.

  25. Similarly, Ong and Chen (2013) find that women bid significantly more than men in all-pay auctions with complete information. Moreover, controlling for the gender of the bidder and the opponent, Ong and Chen argue that observed behavior is consistent with equilibrium behavior where women attach a higher valuation to winning the all-pay auction than men.

  26. For a laboratory experiment on tournaments used as an intrinsic motivation for giving see Duffy and Kornienko (2010). Also, see Sheremeta (2010a, b).

  27. Dickinson and Isaac (1998) and Dickinson (2001) were the first to show the effectiveness of an all-pay auction as an incentive mechanism in raising contributions to public goods. Although, these studies do not explicitly use the term “all-pay auction,” the incentives are such that the highest contributor to the VCM receives a prize.

  28. Another explanation for the lack of overbidding in rank-order tournaments is the high dispersion of the performance noise \( \varepsilon_{i} \). The substantial amount of noise in the CSF may lead subjects to restrain effort, thereby decreasing overbidding. In fact, Nieken (2010) finds that when given the choice between two distributions of performance noise, subjects are reluctant to choose the distribution with the higher variance even when a risk neutral player would find it beneficial to do so. This finding confirms our conjecture that aversion to random shocks in the CSF could help explain the absence of overbidding in rank-order tournaments. Finally, the lack of overbidding in rank-order tournaments can be driven by the fact that the marginal benefit of effort around 0 is very low. In a lottery contest or an all-pay auction it is virtually impossible to win with the effort of 0, but in a rank-order tournament it is possible. Whether it is the convexity of costs, the presence of noise in the CSF, or the low marginal benefit of effort that mitigates overbidding in rank-order tournaments is an interesting question for future research.

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Acknowledgments

We thank two anonymous referees and the Editor of this journal for their valuable suggestions. We have benefitted from the helpful comments of Loukas Balafoutas, Michael Baye, Mike Caldara, Tim Cason, Gary Charness, Subhasish Chowdhury, Cary Deck, David Dickinson, John Duffy, Jörg Franke, David Gill, Turkmen Goksel, Arye Hillman, Tanjim Hossain, Yaakov Kareev, Changxia Ke, Erik Kimbrough, Kai Konrad, Wolfgang Leininger, Noah Lim, Mike McBride, Aidas Masiliunas, Kristin Michelitch, Florian Morath, David Ong, Amnon Rapoport, Brian Roberson, Ariel Rubinstein, Dmitry Ryvkin, Tal Shavit, Jason Shogren, Matthias Sutter, Katya Vasilaky, Casper de Vries, Bart Wilson and participants in seminars at Chapman University, the University California at San Diego, and the University of Texas at Dallas, and the 2012 International Foundation for Research in Experimental Economics Conference at Chapman University. We thank Andy Schotter and Charles Noussair for providing data and Jianing You and David Zhang for valuable research assistance. Part of this work was completed while Kovenock and Sheremeta were visiting the Max Planck Institute for Tax Law and Public Finance. We remain solely responsible for any errors or omissions.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Economics, Kent State University, Kent, OH, 44242, USA

    Emmanuel Dechenaux

  2. Economic Science Institute, Chapman University, One University Drive, Orange, CA, 92866, USA

    Dan Kovenock & Roman M. Sheremeta

  3. Weatherhead School of Management, Case Western Reserve University, 11119 Bellflower Road, Cleveland, OH, 44106, USA

    Roman M. Sheremeta

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  1. Emmanuel Dechenaux
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  2. Dan Kovenock
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Correspondence to Roman M. Sheremeta.

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Dechenaux, E., Kovenock, D. & Sheremeta, R.M. A survey of experimental research on contests, all-pay auctions and tournaments. Exp Econ 18, 609–669 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10683-014-9421-0

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