Collaborative Research: Contests: Experimental Investigation

研发竞赛、竞选活动、诉讼、体育竞赛和全付费拍卖都有一个共同的主题。在这种情况下，个体或群体通过消耗有限的资源来相互竞争，试图赢得外生决定的奖励。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。与快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含义。我们建议扩展理论文献以及实验测试我们的模型的含义。提出了六个实验。两个关于多参与者竞争的实验将我们之前的研究扩展到n （n2）家在新技术产品开发中竞争的企业。研究了对称企业和非对称企业的情况。另外两个关于多层次竞争的实验将调查扩展到同时允许群体内部冲突和群体之间竞争的情况。这些情况经常发生在组织间冲突中，导致竞争群体内部搭便车。我们建议调查不同的奖金分享规则对个人贡献水平的影响，以及不平等群体规模的影响。最后两个关于多阶段比赛的实验将调查向另一个方向扩展到小组内的比赛，其中选手人数随着阶段的增加而减少（例如NBA总冠军）。我们的研究项目主要是由纳什均衡和子博弈完全均衡的博弈论解概念驱动的。从分析这些实验中发现的行为模式中获得的见解将有助于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，以及3)将研究结果应用于最优竞赛的设计。

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.