Tournaments are designed to enhance participants’ effort and productivity. However, ranking near the top may increase psychological pressure and reduce performance. We empirically study the impact of interim rank on performance using data from international diving tournaments. We find...

We characterize the optimal incentive scheme for a manager who faces costly effort decisions and whose ability to generate profits for the firm varies stochastically over time. The optimal contract is obtained as the solution to a dynamic mechanism design problem with hidden actions and...

This paper examines the problem of how to design incentive-compatible mechanisms in environments in which the agents' private information evolves stochastically over time and in which decisions have to be made in each period. The environments we consider are fairly general in that the agents'...