This dissertation contains two essays which examine the roles that individual incentives, competition, and information play in network formation. In the first essay, I examine a model in which two competing groups offer different allocation rules that may depend on the network of connections among the individuals that make up each group. I assume the existence of a single divisible good, such as a monetary prize, which will be divided amongst the members of the winning network. The probability of winning the prize will depend on the network sizes. I examine two well-known allocation rules: the Myerson value and the egalitarian rule. I prove existence of equilibria and characterize the properties of the two networks. The implications of the equilibria networks for the outcome of the contest are discussed. I find that the winning probability of the network using the Myerson value has an upper bound very close to one half. There is no such upper bound for the network using the egalitarian rule. In my second essay, I examine a dynamic model of network formation in which individuals use reinforcement learning to choose their actions. Typically, economic models of network formation assume the entire network structure to be known to all individuals involved. The introduction of reinforcement learning allows us to relax this assumption. Through the use of a state-dependent reinforcement learning rule, one may allow for varying degrees of information available to the agents. Three informational settings are examined and I determine what networks, if any, each model may converge to in the limit. The long-run behavior of each model is examined through the use of simulations and compared to one another. I find that amount and type of information agents have access plays an important role in which networks emerge when there is no dominant strategy for the agents choosing links. If there is a dominant link choosing strategy, the most efficient network structure quickly emerges in each informational setting. Together, these essays investigate how information, incentives, and competition may affect network formation. Individual incentives in the presence of competition can create tension between an individual's social ties and the overall network size. Information plays a key role in the emergent network topologies when there are no dominate network building strategies.

Thesis (M.A.)--Carleton University, 1996. / Also available in electronic format on the Internet.

Organisations accept the fact that innovation is a crucial element in achieving long-term competitive advantage. The key business challenge, however, lies in acquiring the expertise and methodologies needed to effectively motivate, support and nurture innovation. South African companies in particular are performing poorly in developing effective reward strategies to encourage and motivate innovation. This research therefore investigates the critical success factors for rewarding and motivating innovation in the workplace. The results of this study should assist executive managers to formulate reward strategies to stimulate innovation. In line with qualitative research methodological principles, this study followed an exploratory approach to investigating the important factors in rewarding innovation. A total of 15 in-depth interviews were held with executive managers within the Financial Services sector. The sample represented a diverse group of highly successful business leaders, including General Managers (such as CEOs), Human Resource practitioners (such as HR directors) and Innovation Leaders (such as R&D leaders). Key findings reflect that a multi-faceted reward strategy is required to motivate innovation. This includes financial rewards, non-financial rewards, learning and development opportunities, as well as specific elements within the work environment. Leadership was found to be a critical success factor in the implementation of an effective total reward strategy. The research allowed for the development of a framework outlining the critical success factors for rewarding and motivating innovation in the workplace. This is believed to be a useful tool for senior managers who wish to develop a total reward strategy to increase the level of innovation within their organisations. This study also contributes to the body of academic knowledge by clarifying the relationship between innovation and the notion of total reward, which was identified as a gap in the literature. / Dissertation (MBA)--University of Pretoria, 2013. / ccgibs2014 / Gordon Institute of Business Science (GIBS) / MBA / Unrestricted

Thesis disserts upon consumer contests and competitions. It defines their position among other sales promotion tools and studies their specifics. Describes the fundamental steps of the organization of contests as well as the legislative background. The practical part of the thesis is based on field research and aims to get an idea of consumers' attitudes to competitions. It attempts to propose an ideal model of consumer contests.

My dissertation consists of four chapters. In the first chapter, I use a laboratory experiment to analyze how individuals resolve an exploration versus exploitation trade-off. The experiment implements a single-agent exponential bandit model. I find that, as predicted, subjects respond to changes in the prior belief, safe action, and discount factor. However, I commonly find that subjects give up on exploration earlier than predicted. I estimate a structural model that allows for risk aversion, base rate neglect/conservatism, and probability mis-weighting. I find support for risk aversion, conservatism, and probability mis-weighting as potential factors that influence subject behavior. Risk aversion appears to contribute to the finding that subjects explore less than predicted. <div><br></div><div>In the second chapter, I use a laboratory experiment to analyze how a group of voters experiment with a new reform. The experiment implements the continuous time Strulovici (2010) collective experimentation model. I analyze a subset of data where groups and single decision makers should eventually prefer to stop experimentation and abandon the reform. I find three results that are consistent with the modeled experimentation incentives. In this subset of data, groups stop experimentation earlier than single decision makers, wait longer to stop experimentation as the number of revealed winners increases, and stop experimentation earlier than the utilitarian optimum predicts. However, I also find that both groups and single decision makers stop experimentation earlier than predicted. Additional treatments show that this result is unlikely to be explained by standard explanations such as incorrect belief updating or risk aversion. </div><div><br></div><div>In the third chapter, I use a laboratory experiment to investigate the role of group size in an innovation contest. Subjects compete in a discrete time innovation contest, based on Halac et al. (2017), where subjects, at the start of each period, are informed of the aggregate number of innovation attempts. I compare two innovation contests, a two-person and four-person contest, that only differ by contest size and have the same probability of obtaining an innovation in equilibrium. The four-person contest results in more innovations and induces more aggregate innovation attempts than the two-person contest. However, there is some evidence that the two-person contest induces more innovation attempts from an individual than the four-person contest. Subjects' behavior is consistent with subjects placing more weight on their own failed innovation attempts, when updating their beliefs, than their competitors' failed innovation attempts.</div><div><br></div><div>In the fourth chapter, I investigate the role of performance feedback, in the form of a public leaderboard, in innovation competition that features sequential search activity and a range of possible innovation qualities. I find that in the subgame perfect equilibrium of contests with a fixed ending date (i.e., finite horizon), providing public performance feedback results in lower equilibrium effort and lower innovation quality. I conduct a controlled laboratory experiment to test the theoretical predictions and find that the experimental results largely support the theory. In addition, I investigate how individual characteristics affect competitive innovation activity. I find that risk aversion is a significant predictor of behavior both with and without leaderboard feedback and that the direction of this effect is consistent with the theoretical predictions.</div>

Education is at the center of upskilling human capital in developing countries, thereby positively influencing economic growth and development. For decades, many education policies targeted at developing countries have been narrowly focused on improving access to basic education (Barrett et al., 2015). However, access to education does not always translate into educational attainment. Thus, beyond the initial goal of expanding access to education in developing countries, there has been a growing focus on delivering quality education on the development agenda for developing countries in recent years. One popular policy instrument in enhancing education quality has been school choice. Analysis of school choice and the subsequent academic performance outcomes can provide new insight on the economics of education to policymakers, schools, parents and students alike. This dissertation consists of three essays, which focus on understanding the demand for public schools and the returns to school quality in a merit-based competitive school assignment system. In particular, these papers investigate how positive recognition of ability through awards can affect the students’ decision-making process; what the students might gain from attending a more selective school; and how students balance between their preferences for school characteristics and maximizing their chances of admission in a competitive school choice market. Altogether, this dissertation highlights the role of information as well as educational background in explaining differences in school choice decisions and achievement outcomes. In chapter 1, I examine the role of positive recognition on students’ school choice decisions and achievement outcomes in the context of academic competitions. Academic competitions are an essential aspect of education. Given the prevalence and the amount of resources spent organizing them, a natural question that arises is the extent of the impact on winners’ education outcomes when their talent is recognized. I exploit the award structure in Vietnam’s annual regional academic competitions to answer this question. By leveraging the pre-determined share of awards, I apply a regression discontinuity design to assess the effects of receiving a Prize and receiving an Honorable Mention. I find that both types of awards lead to improvements in educational outcomes, and the results are persistent after three years. I also find some evidence of specialization associated with receiving a Prize Award. I hypothesize that long-term effects can be partially explained by school choice: winners are significantly more likely to apply to and consequently enroll in higher-quality schools. There are also prominent differences in educational choices and outcomes along gender lines: female students are more sensitive to award receipts than male students. These findings underscore the positive motivational effects of awards, even among the top performers in a highly competitive schooling market. In chapter 2, I explore the impacts of attending a selective school on students’ educational outcomes. Students in Vietnam are assigned to public high schools based on their performance in a placement exam as well as their ranked choice of schools. Public schools are often oversubscribed, which contributes to exogeneous admission score cutoffs below which students are not considered for admission. By applying a regression discontinuity research design to these admission score cutoffs, I find that students who are marginally admitted to their top-choice public schools are exposed to significantly higher-achieving peers while finding themselves at the bottom of the ability distribution. They experience some improvements in standardized test scores at the end of their high school, but fare worse in school-based achievements and graduation outcomes. These findings highlight the importance of the potential trade-offs between attending more selective schools with better peer quality while receiving a lower ordinal rank in the ability distribution in the assigned school. In addition, the impacts of selective schools on students vary along the lines of the students’ own attitude towards studying as well as their middle school educational background. This substantial heterogeneity collectively highlights the importance of considering the students’ past educational background in interpreting how selective schools might impact students’ outcomes. In chapter 3, I investigate students’ preferences, strategic behaviors and welfare outcomes under a competitive school choice market by conducting a survey on school choice participants in two school districts in Vietnam. The original survey data on school choice participants, coupled with administrative data, afford me the opportunity to understand true preferences and strategies without involving strong assumptions on the students’ beliefs. In order to balance out their own preferences and chance of admission in such a competitive setting, the majority of students exhibit strategic behaviors. However, students from less advanced educational backgrounds tend to have large belief errors and are more likely to make strategic mistakes. Consequently, these students are at a disadvantage, as they find themselves among lower-achieving peers in their new schools. With preference data from the survey, I estimate the students’ preferences for school characteristics and find evidence of heterogeneity in students’ preferences for school characteristics: students from more advanced educational backgrounds value school selectivity and teacher qualification more than their peers. Using these estimates to evaluate students’ welfare under the current assignment mechanism as well as a counterfactual strategy-proof deferred acceptance algorithm, I find that switching to deferred acceptance algorithm can be welfare-improving, particularly for high-performing students. Overall, this paper provides a starting point to directly study the drawbacks of manipulable assignment mechanisms by using survey data and highlight the potential disparity in preferences and application strategies that can further widen the gap in educational mobility.

Background: Throughout recent years, the amounts of competitions on Instagram have increased and is now a popular marketing tool for companies to use. The strong competition in digital marketing has led to the need for brands to effectively utilize this marketing strategy. However, what motivates users to participate is a subject that lacks previous research. Hence, the question of what motivates the users to participate remains. Purpose: The purpose of this study is, therefore, to explore the motivational factors for women in the ages between 16-25, which leads to participation in contests on Instagram. Further, this research additionally aims to proceed with the knowledge of UGC and partly investigate how companies can use the appeared motivational factors when designing and formulating contests.  Method: For this qualitative study, 15 interviews were conducted, using a phenomenological interview approach.  Conclusion: The main conclusion from the analysis was that several motivational factors were discovered that had not earlier been presented in previous research, the most significant one being the social aspects. Furthermore, the size of the prize and the non-motivational factors proved to be of importance for the users. Secondly, factors relating to entertainment, aesthetics and the desire to win were proved to be of high importance as well. Lastly, several managerial applications have also been discovered that could help businesses when forming contests on Instagram.

This dissertation consists of three essays on theoretical analysis of economic agents' decision making and incentives. Chapter 1 gives an outline of the subjects to be examined in the subsequent chapters and shows their conclusions in brief. Chapter 2 explores the decision problem of a superordinate (a principal) regarding whether to delegate its authority or right to make a decision to a subordinate (an agent) in an organization. We first study the optimal contracting problem of the superordinate that specifies the allocation of the authority and wage in a principal-agent setting with asymmetric information, focusing on two motives for delegation, "informative" and "effort-incentive-giving" delegation. Further, we suggest delegating to multiple agents as a way of addressing the asymmetric information problem within an organization, focusing on another motive for delegation, "strategic" delegation. Chapter 3 analyzes the behavior of players in a particular type of contest, called "the weakest-link contest". Unlike a usual contest in which the winning probability of a group in a contest depends on the sum of the efforts of all the players in the group, the weakest-link contest follows a different rule: the winning probability of a group is determined by the lowest effort of the players in the group. We first investigate the effort incentives of the players in the weakest-link contest, and then check whether the hungriest player in each group, who has the largest willingness to exert effort, has an incentive to incentivize the other players in his group in order to make them exert more effort. Chapter 4 examines the decision making of software programmers in the software industry between an open source software project and a commercial software project. Incorporating both intrinsic and extrinsic motivation on open source project participation into a stylized economic model based on utility theory, we study the decision problem of the programmers in the software industry and provide the rationale for open source project participation more clearly. Specifically, we examine the question of how the programmers' intrinsic motivation, extrinsic motivation, and abilities affect their project choices between an open source project and a commercial project, and effort incentives. / Ph. D.

This dissertation comprises three essays on theoretical analysis of middlemen in intermediated markets. Chapter 1 gives a brief survey on the market intermediation literature and also briefly describes the subsequent chapters. In Chapter 2 I study the role of horizontally differentiated middlemen in a bilateral search market in which heterogeneous agents of each group possess private information concerning the value of joint production. I focus on the effect of the middlemen on agents' search efforts and on pricing decisions by middlemen. In particular, I show that the middlemen intensify agents' search activities. I also provide an explanation for why middlemen often use asymmetric pricing for two groups in a market. In Chapter 3 I study a model of platform competition when both indirect network effect and the desirability concerns of the agents are present. The desirability concerns are defined as the perceived quality of platforms. A platform with a higher proportion of high-type agents is regarded as a platform with a better quality. Under these circumstances, I derive conditions for the existence of equilibrium. In a dominant platform equilibrium, I show that some agents may not be served by the dominant platform. I also show that two platforms with different perceived quality may coexist in equilibrium. It suggests that endogenous market segmentation may arise in two-sided markets. In chapter 4 I study the effort-maximizing contest rule when there is a positive externality between aggregate efforts and the contest audience: the audience is more willing to pay for watching a contest if each participating contestant expends more effort. The Tullock rent-seeking contest with endogenous entry is extended by incorporating the contest audience into the model. In order to fund the contest, the organizer with no budget has to collect fees from one or both of two groups. It is shown that the effort-maximizing contest rule under a positive externality attracts only two entrants and, in the unique subgame perfect equilibrium, the entrants are always subsidized regardless of the size of entry costs, and the audience pay a positive fee. / Ph. D.

This thesis presents an analysis on a class of asymmetric imperfectly discrim- inating multi-prize contests with the aim to investigate when more than one prize becomes optimal prize allocation if the average effort is to be maximized. We present n-person model with heterogeneous contestants who compete for two, possibly different, prizes. The contestants may differ in their relative abil- ities, i.e., parameters affecting their probabilities to win either of the prizes. Two different numerical methods for finding pure strategy Nash equilibria are employed. Depending on particular distributions of the abilities, we find two possible scenarios when the second prize becomes optimal. Furthermore, we ad- dress an issue of existence and uniqueness of a pure strategy Nash equilibrium with respect to the returns to scale in effort parameter. JEL Classification C63, D72 Keywords Imperfectly discriminating contests; Heteroge- neous abilities; Multiple prizes; Numerical meth- ods Author's e-mail lida.matyskova@centrum.cz Supervisor's e-mail gregor@fsv.cuni.cz