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This paper examines an apparent contrast in organizing innovation tournaments; seekers offer contestant-agnostic incentives to elicit greater effort from a heterogeneous pool of contestants. Specifically, the study tests whether and how such incentives and the underlying heterogeneity in the contestant pool, assessed in terms of contestants' entry timing, are jointly associated with contestant effort. Thus, the study contributes to the prior literature that has looked at behavioral consequences of entry timing as well as incentives in innovation tournaments.

For hypothesis testing, the study uses a panel dataset of submission activity of over 60,000 contestants observed in nearly 200 innovation tournaments. The estimation employs multi-way fixed effects, accounting for unobserved heterogeneity across contestants, tournaments and submission week. The findings remain stable across a range of robustness checks.

The study finds that, on average, late entrant tends to exert less effort than an early entrant (H1). Results further show that the effort gap widens in tournaments that offer higher incentives. In particular, the effort gap between late and early entrants is significantly wider in tournaments that have attracted superior solutions from several contestants (H2), offer gain in status (H3, marginally significant) or offer a higher monetary reward (H4).

The study's findings counter conventional wisdom, which suggests that incentives have a positive effect on contestant behavior, including effort. In contrast, the study indicates that incentives may have divergent implications for contestant behavior, contingent on contestants' entry timing. As the study discusses, these findings have several implications for research and practice of managing innovation tournaments.

We review the use of behavior from television game shows to infer risk attitudes. These shows provide evidence when contestants are making decisions over very large stakes, and in a replicated, structured way. Inferences are generally confounded by the subjective assessment of skill in some games, and the dynamic nature of the task in most games. We consider the game shows Card Sharks, Jeopardy!, Lingo, and finally Deal Or No Deal. We provide a detailed case study of the analyses of Deal Or No Deal, since it is suitable for inference about risk attitudes and has attracted considerable attention.

This paper aims to summarize antecedents and consequences of risk-taking in tournaments and show the development of tournament optimization considering risk-taking. Moreover, further expansion expectations related to antecedents and consequences of risk-taking in tournaments and tournament optimization considering risk-taking are discussed.

A comprehensive bibliographic retrieval and further literature review and systematics re-organization are used to build the framework with respect to risk-taking in tournaments. Then, qualitative analysis is used to present conclusions of existing research.

By summarizing various antecedents, different consequences and tournament optimizations with regard to risk-taking in tournaments of existing research, the authors present a series of research opportunities regarding risk-taking in tournaments that can propel the advancement of tournament theory.

The studies on risk-taking in tournament have been recently received wide attention and are growing vigorously. Based on the summary and re-organization, the framework of literature studying risk-taking in tournaments is built. This literature review also helps researchers learn the advance of risk-taking in tournament and provides fruitful direction for future research on this topic.

An aspect of prospect theory posits that decision‐makers, when making decisions in the face of risk, make their decisions with respect to a pre‐existing reference point or ‘frame’ (the statusquo bias). We utilize data from the Australian version of the TV game show, Deal or No Deal, to explore whether risk aversion varies with a change in reference point in a context where stakes are real and high.We achieve this by exploiting a special and unique Australian feature of the Deal or No Deal lottery‐choice setting, namely, the existence of the Chance or the SuperCase rounds (supplementary rounds). These rounds reverse the decision‐frame that was obtained in earlier (normal) rounds. We fit and estimate a complete dynamic decision‐making model to our dataset and find that the risk aversion estimate of contestants who participated in both the normal and the supplementary rounds indeed differs depending on the nature of the round, a result consistent with the operation of the existence of a framing effect.

The authors believe that comparing individuals to groups' decision making is crucial provided that many important choices in society are made by groups, i.e. committees, governing bodies, juries, business partners and families. This study aims to discuss the aforementioned topic.

The authors analyze risky decision making in the context of the television game show Deal or No Deal – Italian edition. Specifically, the authors scrutinize and compare individual (standard “Deal or No Deal” edition) and group (special edition) choices in the risky choice context provided by programe.

After analyzing contestant's behavior in the standard edition episodes plus a special edition the authors calculate a risk index observing that no statically significant difference is present between individuals' and groups' actions.

In the “Deal or No Deal” special edition contestant were groups of two strangers. It is not uncommon to have couples playing on TV, however the individuals usually know each other well and have relationships in real life. The special edition therefore provides a unique setting (absent to best of the authors’ knowledge in the literature) for investigation and could offer real-world insight. Indeed, in many instances the authors have to contract/make decisions with people the authors do not know/know very little (i.e. occasional business partners, representative at other companies/institutions, insurance/finance advisors, new work colleagues, etc.).

As the application of crowdsourcing contests grows, leveraging the participation of superstars (i.e. solvers who have outstanding performance records in a crowdsourcing platform) becomes an emergent approach for managers to solve crowdsourced problems. Although much is known about superstars’ performance implications, it remains unclear whether and how their participation affects the size of a contest crowd for a crowdsourcing contest. Based on social contagion theory, this paper aims to examine the impact of superstars’ participation on the crowd size and studies how this impact varies across solvers with different heterogeneity in terms of skills, exposure and cultural proximity with superstars in crowdsourcing contests.

This paper uses secondary data from one crowdsourcing platform that includes 6,587 innovation contests to examine superstars’ main and contextual effects on the crowd size of a contest.

Our results reveal that superstars’ participation positively affects the crowd size of a contest in general. This finding suggests that social contagion is a fundamental mechanism underlying crowd formation in crowdsourcing contests. Our results also indicate that in contests that involve multiple superstars, superstars’ effect on crowd size becomes negative when we simultaneously consider other solvers’ heterogeneity in terms of skills, exposure and cultural background, and this negative effect will be intensified by increases in the skill gap, extent of exposure and cultural proximity between superstars and other solvers in the same contest.

Our research enhances the understanding of the influence of superstars and the mechanism underlying the emergence of contest crowds in crowdsourcing contests and contributes knowledge to better understand social contagion in a competitive setting. The results are meaningful for sourcing managers and platform supervisors to design contests and supervise crowd size in crowdsourcing contests.

In this paper, we review the literature on pay variation (e.g., pay dispersion, pay compression, pay range) in organizations. Pay variation research has increased markedly in the past two decades and much progress has been made in terms of understanding its consequences for individual, team, and organizational outcomes. Our review of this research exposes several levels-related assumptions that have limited theoretical and empirical progress. We isolate the issues that deserve attention, develop an illustrative multilevel model, and offer a number of testable propositions to guide future research on pay structures.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate both the impact of different reward types and the adoption of knowledge-sharing practice on a crowdsourcing-based open innovation contest. Despite the benefit of knowledge sharing, contestants could struggle to find a balance between knowledge sharing and knowledge protection in open innovation.

The authors' approach follows a stylised contest model in a game-theoretical setting in which contestants first decide on their efforts and then the contest sponsor chooses the winner. Moreover, the outcome of an open innovation contest is delineated as either intermediate goods that require further refinement and risk-taking versus a market-ready end product for the contest sponsor. The authors also investigate how knowledge sharing among contestants would be influenced by reward types such as fixed-monetary prizes vs performance-contingent awards.

The contest sponsor will lower the prize level after adopting knowledge sharing. Therefore, the total effort will decline regardless of the reward type. Moreover, the choice of reward types depends on the contest sponsor's characteristics because the performance-contingent award is suitable for a large market size but the fixed-monetary prize can more efficiently raise the quantity of contestant inputs.

Prior studies have tested the connection between contest performance and knowledge sharing in crowdsourcing-based contests; however, there is not an integrated framework to best design the operation of a contest when considering different reward types and knowledge-sharing practices.

There is sufficient empirical evidence to suggest that discrimination, defined as absence of equal opportunities, exists before the market as well as in the market against certain social categories in India. Inequality in access to sources of human capital acquisition reinforces inequality in the labour market and vice versa. Apparently, caste‐community discrimination and class discrimination overlap. However, in the case of socially deprived categories, the latter accentuates the former. The impact of modernisation notwithstanding, the inegalitarian sacral tradition of caste still has strong hold over the minds and lives of Indians. The development processes have strengthened caste and community consciousness resulting in the metamorphosis of different social categories into interest groups. With patron‐client relationship as the basis for political mobilization, development policies have favoured the dominant social categories as well as the articulate better‐off sections across all social categories. So it seems that “divinely ordained” social inequities persist in a secular garb, though possibly with reduced inhumanity. Yet, with increasing political assertion of the lower social categories and widening opportunities for social mobility, hegemony of the traditional elite is likely to decline. The change in the composition of the elite should foster non‐brahmanical pragmatic cultural ethos conducive to social mobility and development. The policies designed to promote equal opportunities, taking into account heterogeneity of Indian society, will speed up the process of socio‐economic change.

Analysis of management compensation has focused on the principal — agent problem. We address the problem confronting owners who must choose a manager without knowing the productivity of individual managers. We find performance contingent contracts may result in a separating equilibrium in which high productivity managers accept contracts low productivity managers find unacceptable.