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Indefinitely repeated contests: An experimental study

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  14 March 2025

Philip Brookins Open the ORCID record for Philip Brookins [Opens in a new window] ,
Dmitry Ryvkin Open the ORCID record for Dmitry Ryvkin [Opens in a new window]  and
Andrew Smyth Open the ORCID record for Andrew Smyth [Opens in a new window]
Philip Brookins*
Affiliation:
Department of Economics, University of South Carolina, Columbia, USA
Dmitry Ryvkin*
Affiliation:
Department of Economics, Florida State University, Tallahassee, USA
Andrew Smyth*
Affiliation:
Department of Economics, Marquette University, Milwaukee, USA
*
[email protected]
[email protected]
[email protected]
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Abstract

We experimentally explore indefinitely repeated contests. Theory predicts more cooperation, in the form of lower expenditures, in indefinitely repeated contests with a longer expected time horizon. Our data support this prediction, although this result attenuates with contest experience. Theory also predicts more cooperation in indefinitely repeated contests compared to finitely repeated contests of the same expected length, and we find empirical support for this. Finally, theory predicts no difference in cooperation across indefinitely repeated winner-take-all and proportional-prize contests, yet we find evidence of less cooperation in the latter, though only in longer treatments with more contests played. Our paper extends the experimental literature on indefinitely repeated games to contests and, more generally, contributes to an infant empirical literature on behavior in indefinitely repeated games with “large” strategy spaces.

Keywords

ContestIndefinitely repeated gameCooperationExperimentC72C73C91D72
Type
Original Paper
Information
Experimental Economics , Volume 24 , Issue 4 , December 2021 , pp. 1390 - 1419
Copyright
Copyright © 2021 Economic Science Association

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Footnotes

Supplementary Information The online version contains supplementary material available at https://doi.org/10.1007/s10683-021-09703-0.

We thank the Economic Science Institute, the Marquette University College of Business Administration, and the Max Planck Institute for Research on Collective Goods for funding. Megan Luetje and Arthur Nelson provided excellent assistance conducting the experiments. For helpful feedback, we thank seminar participants at Chapman University, Marquette University, the 2017 Contests: Theory and Evidence Conference (University of East Anglia), and Werner Güth and participants of the Experimental and Behavioral Economics Workshop (LUISS Guido Carli University, Rome). This paper supersedes an earlier manuscript that circulated online under the same title. Relative to that earlier manuscript, this paper features improved experimental procedures, less ambiguous instructions, and wholly new data (a 50% increase in sample size over the older manuscript). We thank Roberto Weber and two anonymous referees for comments that have greatly improved the paper. Any errors are ours alone.

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