Promotions play an important role for the provision of incentives in firms. We analyze incentives in multistage elimination tournaments with controlled laboratory experiments. In our two main treatments, we compare a two-stage tournament to a one-stage tournament. Subjects in the two-stage treatment provide excess effort in the first stage, both with respect to Nash predictions and compared to the strategically equivalent one-stage tournament. Additional control treatments confirm that excess effort in early stages is a robust finding and suggest that above-equilibrium effort might be driven by limited degrees of forward-looking behavior and subjects deriving nonmonetary value from competing.

We study how online job search advice affects job search behavior and labor market outcomes of unemployed workers. In a large-scale field experiment embedded in the online platform of the Danish public employment service, we provide job seekers with vacancy information and occupational recommendations. Using a two-stage randomized design with regionally varying treatment intensities, we examine both direct effects of advice and treatment spillovers. We find that advice significantly increases employment and earnings when provided to a limited share of job seekers. As treatment intensity rises, these effects diminish and eventually disappear. The decline is driven by negative spillovers among treated job seekers, consistent with increased congestion in the occupations toward which job seekers redirect their search. Spillover effects on untreated job seekers are heterogeneous and depend on how advice alters occupation-specific competition in local labor markets.