Strategic behavior in contests with heterogeneous agents: Evidence from the Field

Contests and tournaments are widely used to spur innovation and motivate behavior. At the same time contests have been shown to be prone to strategic behaviors like e.g. sabotage. We investigate two forms of strategic behavior of heterogeneous agents in large contests. Based on a formal model of agent behavior we develop propositions and test these in a dataset of more than 38 million observations of peer-ratings of 74,525 individuals from 511...