Promotions and Incentives: The Case of Multistage Elimination Tournaments

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.