This study reports experiments that examine outcomes when agents choose between a payment scheme that rewards based on absolute performance (i.e., piece rate) and a scheme that rewards based on relative performance (i.e., a tournament). Holding total payments in the tournament constant, performance is higher when the tournament option is winner-take-all compared to a graduated tournament (i.e., second and third-place performers also receive a payment). Performance is higher in the winner-take all tournaments even among participants that choose the piece-rate option. While there is a modest amount of overcrowding, there are no significant differences in overcrowding across conditions. Entry rates into the tournament and the relative ability of tournament entrants (compared to non-entrants in the same condition) are higher in the graduated tournament condition than the winner-take-all conditions. Consequently, the winner-take-all tournament is more efficient than the graduated tournament (incentive effects are stronger and the overcrowding is about the same), but the graduated tournament provides a more effective mechanism to identify the most capable performer in a talent pool.

We investigate the emergence of discrimination in an experiment where individuals affiliated to different groups compete for a monetary prize, submitting independent bids to an auctioneer. The auctioneer receives perfect information about the bids (there is no statistical discrimination), and she has no monetary incentive to favor the members of her own group (the bidders are symmetric). We observe nonetheless some discrimination by auctioneers, who tend to assign the prize more frequently to a member of their own group when two or more players put forward the highest bid. Out-group bidders react to this bias and reduce significantly their bids, causing an average decay of their earnings throughout the game, with cumulative effects that generate unequal outcomes. Because the initial bias is costless, such mechanism can survive even in a competitive market, providing a rationale for the long-run persistence of discrimination.

We study gender differences in relation to performance and sabotage in competitions. While we find no systematic gender differences in performance in the real effort task, we observe a strong gender gap in sabotage choices in our experiment. This gap is rooted in the uncertainty about the opponent’s sabotage: in the absence of information about the opponent’s sabotage choice, males expect to suffer from sabotage to a higher degree than females and choose higher sabotage levels themselves. If beliefs are exogenously aligned by implementing sabotage via strategy method, the gender gap in sabotage choices disappears. Moreover, providing a noisy signal about the sabotage level from which subjects might suffer leads to an endogenous alignment of beliefs and eliminates the gender gap in sabotage.

We construct a shifted version of the Turán sieve method developed by R. Murty and the second author and apply it to counting problems on tournaments. More precisely, we obtain upper bounds for the number of tournaments which contain a fixed number of restricted $r$-cycles. These are the first concrete results which count the number of cycles over “all tournaments”.

In this paper, we combine group-theoretic and combinatorial techniques to study $\wedge$-transitive digraphs admitting a cartesian decomposition of their vertex set. In particular, our approach uncovers a new family of digraphs that may be of considerable interest.

This article analyzes the contractual relationship between a wine cooperative (winery) and its member (growers). This relationship is plagued by moral hazard and adverse selection problems in grape quality. Indeed, growers can be opportunistic since the cooperative is unable to observe: (1) their effort level due to imperfect monitoring technology; and (2) their productive abilities (types) due to adverse selection. Because the growers' vineyard practices and efforts are one of the main determinants of grape quality, the cooperative implements an incentive compensation system to induce growers to make the maximum effort toward the achievement of quality. This compensation scheme is similar to that in tournaments (Green and Stokey, 1983; Knoeber, 1989; Lazear and Rosen, 1981; Prendergast, 1999). In our case, the cooperative promotes competition between growers by offering a promotion to a higher-quality contract, while, at the same time, organizing the contest by creating homogeneous groups of growers using a menu of contracts and monitoring through regular visits to the vineyard. Using a database of 1,219 contracts, we test the effect of: (1) the cooperative's tournament compensation scheme; (2) the menu of contracts and monitoring mechanism. The results of our econometric estimations provide some confirmation of both effects. (JEL classifications: L14, D82, Q13)

A binary structure $S$ has the pigeonhole property $\left( P \right)$ if every finite partition of $S$ induces a block isomorphic to $S$. We classify all countable tournaments with $\left( P \right)$; the class of orders with $\left( P \right)$ is completely classified.