Many economic, political and social environments can be described as contests in which agents exert costly effort while competing over the distribution of a scarce resource. These environments have been studied using Tullock contests, all-pay auctions and rank-order tournaments. This survey provides a comprehensive review of experimental research on these three canonical contests. First, we review studies investigating the basic structure of contests, including the number of players and prizes, spillovers and externalities, heterogeneity, risk and incomplete information. Second, we discuss dynamic contests and multi-battle contests. Then we review studies examining sabotage, feedback, bias, collusion, alliances, group contests and gender, as well as field experiments. Finally, we discuss applications of contests and suggest directions for future research.

Several experimental studies have shown that the crowding-out effect of monitoring may outweigh its disciplining effect through intrinsic motivation destruction, thereby reducing effort. However, most of these experiments use numeric effort tasks that subjects may not be intrinsically motivated to complete. This paper aims to analyze the incentive effects of monitoring using a real-effort task for which intrinsic motivation is more likely to exist. We conducted two similar experiments, in the lab in Montreal and in the field in Ouagadougou. In contrast to the lab, subjects in the field are unaware they are taking part in an experiment.

The following results are observed both in the lab and in the field. Relative to the baseline treatment, we find that our two monitoring treatments significantly increase effort, in line with agency theory. However, effort levels are not significantly different between the monitoring treatments. Finally, increasing the subjects’ wage is found to have no effect on effort.

We conduct a field experiment with Amazon Mechanical Turk (“AMT”) workers to causally assess the effect of introducing a control mechanism in an existing work relationship on workers’ performance on tasks of varying difficulty. We find that introducing control significantly reduces performance. This reduction occurs primarily on challenging tasks, while performance on simple tasks is unaffected. The negative effects are primarily driven by workers who exhibit non-pecuniary motivation in the absence of control. Our results show that there are adverse effects of control, and they suggest that these adverse effects are of particular concern to firms that rely on high performance on challenging tasks.

Recently, in their 2019 paper, Poyago-Theotoky and Yong consider a managerial Cournot duopoly with pollution externalities and emission taxes and propose an explicit environmental incentive in a managerial compensation contract. The authors compare several exogenous equilibria emerging in the symmetric sub-games in which the owner offers either the environmental delegation contract or the standard sales delegation contract: abatement and social welfare (resp. emission taxes) under environmental delegation are higher (resp. lower) than under sales delegation. The present work extends their model using a game-theoretic approach to analyse the asymmetric sub-games, in which only one firm adopts the environmental contract, and adds the contract decision stage. Results show that the environmental contract never emerges as the unique sub-game perfect Nash equilibrium of this non-cooperative managerial decision game. Indeed, if the green R&D technology is efficient, the sales contract emerges as the unique Pareto-inefficient Nash equilibrium. Otherwise, if the green R&D technology is inefficient, multiple Nash equilibria in pure strategies exist (coordination game). Our findings offer direct policy implications.

Overwhelmingly, research examining temporary work agency (TWA) employment suggests that agencies rely on cost-based HRM, which coincides with substandard outcomes for TWA workers and clients. While contrasting literature indicates that ‘value adding’ HRM may yield more positive outcomes, empirical evidence remains scarce. This case study–based research begins to redress this gap by comparing TWAs reliant on cost-based and ‘value adding’ HRM within the hospitality industry. Findings illustrate that TWA employment and ‘value adding’ HRM are compatible and advantageous, yielding superior outcomes for TWA workers and clients.

This article develops a non-cooperative game with managerial quantity-setting firms in which owners choose whether to delegate output and abatement decisions to managers through a contract based on emissions (conventionally denoted as ‘green’ delegation, GD) instead of sales (sales delegation, SD), and the government levies an emissions tax to incentivise firms’ emissions-reduction actions. First, it compares the Nash equilibrium outcomes between GD and SD and then contrasts them also with profit maximisation (PM). A plethora of Nash equilibria emerges, especially in the case GD versus PM (the ‘green delegation game’), depending on the public awareness toward environmental quality, ranging from the coordination game to the ‘green’ prisoner's dilemma. Second, though the contract under GD incentivises managers for emissions, the environmental damage is lower than under SD. This is because the optimal tax more than compensates the incentive for emissions. These findings suggest that designing GD contracts paradoxically favours environmental quality.

This article examines the influence of equity ownership structure (stock market listing and identity of shareholders) on human resource management practices. The empirical analysis uses the 2004-2005 Workplace Industrial Relations Survey (REPONSE survey), based on a sample of 2930 establishments with 20 employees or more, representative of the French private sector. Our findings confirm the importance of listing and, to a lesser extent, of the identity of shareholders as determinants of human resource management practices, considering temporary work arrangements (agency work, fixed-term contracts and sub-contracting), pay policy (wage levels and use of variable pay) and training expenditures.