Document Type

Article

Publication Date

2015

Abstract

In many contests, such as political campaigns or R&D expenditures, there is at least some trade-off between immediate money outlay and potential future benefits. This timing aspect has mostly been ignored by the contest literature. If contestants exhibit a strong present bias, such as that shown by past individual choice experiments, then benefits that are deferred to the future will lead to a significant drop in investment. This paper uses controlled laboratory experiments to explore how the timing of prize payment impacts behavior in a contest with a unique Nash equilibrium strategy. We find no evidence that people significantly discount future prizes in our contests, despite the fact that we do replicate present bias in a separate individual choice experiment.

Comments

This is the accepted version of the following article:

Deck, C. and Jahedi, S. (2015). “Time Discounting in Strategic Contests,” Journal of Economics and Management Strategy 24(1), Spring 2015, pp. 151-164.

which has been published in final form at DOI: 10.1111/jems.12082

Peer Reviewed

1

Copyright

Wiley

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