In a common-value environment with multi-stage competition, losing a stage conveys positive news about a rival's estimation of a contested prize, capable of balancing the discouraging effect of falling behind. We show that, due to players' learning from stage outcomes, aggregate incentives under private information are often greater than under public information and may even exceed the static competition benchmark. Moreover, laggards can become more motivated than leaders, giving rise to long-lasting fights. Our results have implications for the duration of R&D races, the desirability of feedback in labour and procurement contests, and the campaign spending and selective efficiency of presidential primaries.

This article provides a tractable model of inter‐temporal price‐discrimination by heterogeneous firms, imperative for our understanding of advance purchase markets in the wake of entry. The pricing schedule of an industry leader, whose product is more likely to match consumers' preferences, differs systematically from a newcomer's pricing. By diverting competition to a stage where consumers face uncertainty about their preferences, advance selling reduces prices while increasing the newcomer's market share and profitability relative to the industry leader. Policies curtailing firms' ability to sell in advance, although potentially beneficial for welfare, may consolidate an industry leader's position and reduce consumers' surplus.

This paper endogenizes a monopolist's choice between selling and renting in a non-anonymous durable goods setting with short-term commitment, by allowing for contracts that determine the good's allocation not only at the beginning but also at the end of a given period. We show that the revenue-maximizing menu of contracts features screening by mode of trade when future trade is subject to frictions and the monopolist is more patient than consumers. Selling to high types while renting to low types, allows the monopolist to defer part of his compensation in form of a reduction of consumers' future information rents while lowering the allocational costs of ordinary, intertemporal screening.

This paper uncovers a novel mechanism through which pay dispersion can have a negative effect on firm performance, even in the absence of equity or fairness considerations. We use a stylized model of a self-managed work team to show that, when team-work involves heterogeneous tasks, the provision of incentives to exert effort conflicts with the provision of incentives to share information relevant for decision-making. Pay dispersion deteriorates information sharing as it induces workers to conceal "bad news" to maintain their coworkers motivation. The practical implications of our theory are that team empowerment should go hand in hand with pay compression and that empowerment should be avoided when team production involves strongly heterogeneous tasks.

This paper proposes a tractable model of a dynamic contest where players have private information about the contest’s prize. We show that private information helps to encourage players who have fallen behind, leading to an increase in aggregate incentives. We derive the optimal information design for a designer interested in the maximization of aggregate effort. Optimal signals turn out to be private and imperfectly informative and aim to level the playing field at any stage of the dynamic interaction

This article examines the influence of information on market performance in an advance purchase setting. Information reduces the risk that an advance purchase results in a mismatch between consumer preferences and product characteristics. However, information may also raise the number of advance purchases by increasing firms' incentive to offer advance purchase discounts. Accounting for consumers' aversion toward losses/risks turns out to be crucial as it changes our assessment of policies aiming to improve consumers' information: Under monopoly, information can be detrimental both for efficiency and consumer surplus, whereas under competition, information is doubly beneficial because it mitigates intertemporal business stealing.

This paper provides a rationale for equal sharing in heterogeneous partnerships. We introduce project choice and information sharing to a standard team production setting. A team with two agents can choose whether they want to work on a status quo project or on an alternative project. If the (expected) quality of the projects is given and common knowledge, it is optimal for team surplus to give a higher share to the more productive agent in order to optimally motivate. If agents have private information, we have to give the higher share of profits to the less productive agent if we want agents to share this information, which would allow for better adaptation. Equal revenuesharing strikes a balance between the two objectives of adaptation and motivation and can be efficient even in the presence of considerable productivity differences across partners.

Do the contests with the largest prizes attract the most able contestants? To what extent do contestants avoid competition? We show that the distribution of abilities is crucial in determining contest choice. Complete sorting exists only when the proportion of high-ability contestants is small. As this proportion increases, high-ability contestants shy away from competition and sorting decreases, making reverse sorting a possibility. We test our theoretical predictions with a large panel data set containing contest choice over 20years. We use exogenous variation in the participation of highly able competitors to provide evidence for the relationship among prizes, competition and sorting.

This paper considers dynamic bilateral trade with short-term commitment. We show that, when the seller is more patient than the buyer, there exist systematic differences between the optimal selling and renting mechanisms. While the former consists of simple price-posting, the latter induces the buyer to choose between a secure- and a random-delivery contract. Allowing for mechanisms more general than price-posting reduces the seller's cost of learning the buyer's valuation in the renting case. Renting leads to more learning than selling but (unless the horizon is sufficiently long) only when general mechanisms are available. Our results contrast with the common view that the restriction to price-posting is innocuous and that informational asymmetries are more persistent under renting than under selling.

When products are sold in advance, i.e. prior to consumption, consumers trade off an early, uninformed purchase at a low price against a late, informed purchase at a high price. This paper considers the effect of market structure on the prevalence of advance selling. We show that in an oligopolistic market with multi-product firms, advance selling (with its associated allocative inefficiency) is decreasing in market concentration when the consumers’ preference uncertainty is high but can be increasing when uncertainty is low.

This article offers a tractable model of (oligopolistic) competition in differentiated product markets characterized by individual demand uncertainty. The main result shows that, in equilibrium, firms offer advance purchase discounts and that these discounts are larger than in the monopolistic benchmark. Competition reduces welfare by increasing the fraction of consumers who purchase in advance, that is, without (full) knowledge of their preferences.

We use a mechanism-design approach to study a team whose members select a joint project and exert individual efforts to execute it. Members have private information about the qualities of alternative projects. Information sharing is obstructed by a trade-off between adaptation and motivation. We determine the conditions under which first-best project and effort choices are implementable and show that these conditions can become relaxed as the team grows in size. We also characterize the second-best mechanism and find that it may include a motivational bias, that is, a bias in favor of the team's initially preferred project, and higher-than-optimal effort by uninformed team members.

We use a mechanism–design approach to study a team whose members choose a joint project and exert individual efforts to execute it. Members have private information about the qualities of alternative projects. Information sharing is obstructed by a trade–off between adaptation and motivation. We determine the conditions under which first–best project and effort choices are implementable and show that these conditions can become relaxed as the team grows in size. This contrasts with the common argument (based on free–riding) that efficiency is harder to achieve in larger teams. We also characterize the second–best mechanism and find that decision–making may be biased either in favor or against the team’s initially preferred alternative.

We use a mechanism–design approach to study a team whose members choose a joint project and exert individual efforts to execute it. Members have private information about the qualities of alternative projects. Information sharing is obstructed by a trade–off between adaptation and motivation. We determine the conditions under which first–best project and effort choices are implementable and show that these conditions can become relaxed as the team grows in size. This contrasts with the common argument (based on free–riding) that efficiency is harder to achieve in larger teams. We also characterize the second–best mechanism and find that decision–making may be biased either in favor or against the team’s initially preferred alternative. JEL Classifications: D02, D23, L29

When players compete repeatedly, prizes won in earlier contests may improve the players’ abilities in later contests. This paper determines the allocation of prizes within and across contests that maximizes the (weighted) sum of aggregate efforts.

This article considers advance selling problems. It explains why some goods (e.g. airline tickets) are sold cheap to early buyers, while others (e.g. theatre tickets) offer discounts to those who buy late. We derive the profit maximising selling strategy for a monopolist when aggregate demand is certain but buyers face uncertainty about their individual demands. When aggregate demand exceeds capacity, both Advance Purchase Discounts as well as Clearance Sales might be optimal. We determine how the comparison of these price discrimination strategies depends on the rationing rule, capacity costs and the availability of temporal capacity limits, price commitment and resale.

When several contests compete for the participation of a common set of players, a contest's allocation of prizes not only induces incentive effects but also participation effects. Our model predicts that an increase in the sensitivity with which contest outcomes depend on players' efforts makes flatter prize structures more attractive to participants. In equilibrium, contests that aim to maximize the number of participants will award multiple prizes if and only if this sensitivity is sufficiently high. Moreover, the prize awarded to the winner is decreasing in the contests' sensitivity. We provide empirical evidence from professional road running using race–distance as a measure of sensitivity. We show that steeper prize structures are more attractive to top‐ranked runners in longer, that is, less sensitive, races. In line with our theory, longer races do in fact offer steeper prize structures.

This paper considers a model of team formation featuring a trade-off between synergies and free-riding. Endogenizing team size makes welfare losses dependent on the technology of team production and leads to an insufficient exploitation of potential synergies. Efficiency is increased if team size i s determined by an outside owner.

This article analyses the allocation of prizes in contests. While existing models consider a single contest with an exogenously given set of players, in our model several contests compete for participants. As a consequence, prizes not only induce incentive effects but also participation effects. We show that contests that aim to maximize players' aggregate effort will award their entire prize budget to the winner. In contrast, multiple prizes will be awarded in contests that aim to maximize participation and the share of the prize budget awarded to the winner increases in the contests' randomness. We also provide empirical evidence for this relationship using data from professional road running. In addition, we show that prize structures might be used to screen between players of differing ability.

This paper endogenizes the timing of bilateral contracting between one principal and multiple agents in the presence of externalities. Contracting simultaneously with all agents is optimal for the principal if externalities become weaker the more an agent trades. If instead externalities become stronger, sequential negotiations might benefit the principal as they lower the agents’ outside options. Under some linearity conditions, the principal's preferences with respect to different timings of contracting are opposed to their efficiency ranking.