Collaborative Research: Contests: Experimental Investigation

合作研究：竞赛：实验调查

• 批准号: 0114138
• 负责人: Amnon Rapoport
• 金额: $ 7.73万
• 依托单位: University of Arizona
• 依托单位国家: 美国
• 项目类别: Standard Grant
• 财政年份: 2001
• 资助国家: 美国
• 起止时间: 2001-04-01 至 2004-03-31
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=0114138&HistoricalAwards=false
• 关键词: Collaborative; Research; Contests; Experimental; Investigation

R&D competitions, election campaigns, litigation, sport competitions, and all-pay auctions all have a common theme. In these situations individual agents or groups of agents compete with one another by expending limited resources in an attempt to win an exogenously determined prize. Contributions to the theoretical literature on such contests come from economics, political science, organizational theory, marketing, and strategic management. In contrast to the rapidly growing body of theoretical literature, there have been very few empirical studies designed to test the implications of the various models. We propose extending the theoretical literature as well as experimentally testing the implications of our models. Six experiments are proposed. Two experiments on multi-player contests extend our previous investigation to n (n2) firms competing in the development of a new technology product. Both the cases of symmetric and asymmetric firms are examined. Two additional experiments on multi-level contests extend the investigation to situations that allow simultaneously for within-group conflicts and between-group competitions. These situations occur frequently in inter-organizational conflicts that elicit free riding within the competing groups. We propose to investigate the effects of different rules for sharing the prize on the level of individual contribution, and the effects of unequal group sizes. The final two experiments on multi-stage contests extend the investigation in yet another direction to within-group competitions with shortlisting in which the number of contestants decreases from stage to stage (e.g., NBA championship). Our research program is mostly driven by the game theoretic solution concepts of Nash equilibrium and subgame perfect equilibrium. The insights gained from analyzing the behavioral patterns uncovered in the proposed experiments should help in 1) assessing the descriptive power of these solution concepts, 2) stimulating new theoretical and experimental research, and 3) applying the findings to the design of optimal contests.

研发竞赛、竞选活动、诉讼、体育竞赛和全薪拍卖都有一个共同的主题。在这些情况下，个体代理或代理组通过消耗有限的资源来相互竞争，试图赢得外部决定的奖励。对这类竞赛的理论文献的贡献来自经济学、政治学、组织理论、市场营销和战略管理。 与迅速增长的理论文献相比，很少有实证研究旨在测试各种模型的影响。我们建议扩展的理论文献，以及实验测试我们的模型的影响。提出了六个实验。两个多人竞争的实验扩展了我们以前的研究，n（n2）家公司竞争的新技术产品的开发。对称和非对称企业的情况下进行检查。两个额外的实验多层次的比赛扩展调查的情况下，同时允许组内冲突和组间竞争。这些情况经常发生在组织间冲突中，这些冲突导致竞争群体内部的搭便车。我们建议调查的影响，不同的规则分享奖的个人贡献的水平，以及不平等的群体规模的影响。关于多阶段竞赛的最后两个实验将调查在另一个方向上扩展到具有入围名单的组内竞赛，其中参赛者的数量从一个阶段到另一个阶段减少（例如，NBA总冠军）。我们的研究计划主要是由纳什均衡和子博弈完美均衡的博弈论解决方案的概念。从分析实验中发现的行为模式中获得的见解应该有助于1）评估这些解决方案概念的描述能力，2）激发新的理论和实验研究，3）将研究结果应用于最佳竞赛的设计。