Journal of Political Economy Vol. 129 No. 2 2021
Dynamic Tournament Design: Evidence from Prediction Contests
Abstract
Online contests have become a prominent form of innovation procurement. Contest platforms often display a real-time public leaderboard to provide performance feedback. The impact of information disclosure on players’ decisions is theoretically ambiguous: some players may get discouraged and quit, while others may decide to keep working to remain competitive. We investigate the impact of a leaderboard on contest outcomes using two complementary approaches. First, we estimate a dynamic model using observational data and compare the equilibria with and without a leaderboard. Second, we present experimental evidence from student competitions. We find that a leaderboard on average improves competition outcomes.
- DOI
- 10.1086/711762
- Volume
- 129
- Issue
- 2
- Pages
- 383-420
- Language
- en
- Sources
- bibtex:phds-export.bib openalex crossref