Finance and Financial Management Commons^™

The Aggregate Impacts Of Tournament Incentives In Experimental Asset Markets, Debapriya J. Paul, Julia Henker, Sian Owen

Julia Henker

Existing studies of the aggregate impacts of tournament incentives find that asset price bubbles in experimental markets are larger and do not dissipate with experience when participants trade under tournament incentives. However, these results potentially overstate the real-world impacts of tournament incentives for two reasons. First, they examine tournaments in a restrictive single-asset market setting, which constrains the risk-taking options available to traders. Second, by purely conferring additional rewards for good relative performance, the tournament contracts used ignore the risk-moderating role played by penalties that are also written into or implicit in real-world counterparts. We address these gaps by examining …