Richard L. Fullerton

Auctioning Entry into Tournaments

A research tournament model with heterogeneous contestants is presented. For a large class of contests the optimal number of competitors is two. This insight makes designing the tournament easier and highlights the importance of selecting highly qualified contestants. While customary uniform‐price and discriminatory‐price auctions are intuitively appealing mechanisms for solving this adverse selection problem, in practice they generally will not be efficient mechanism for selecting contestants. Instead, we propose an alternative auction format that is equally simple to implement and efficiently selects the most qualified contestants to compete, regardless of the form of contestant heterogeneity.

Using Auctions To Reward Tournament Winners: Theory and Experimental Investigations

This article explores theoretical and experimental implications of using auctions to reward winners of research tournaments. This process is a hybrid of the research tournament for a prize and a first-price auction held after the research is complete. The bids in the auction consist of a vector of both quality of the innovation and price. The experimental evidence supports the hypothesis that conducting auctions at the end of research tournaments will generally reduce the sponsors prize expenditure relative to fixed-prize research tournaments. The potential importance of these results to the U.S. Department of Defense acquisition process is emphasized.

An empirical assessment of us air force

The US Air Force is facing a record shortfall in pilots over the coming decade. Using personnel data on more than 10,000 Air Force pilots, this study examines the factors affecting the retention of pilots and assesses the effectiveness of the pilot bonus programme implemented by the Air Force to reduce attrition. Although surveys indicated sustained deployment rates were the leading cause of job dissatisfaction among Air Force pilots, the results of this study suggest economic factors had the largest impact on retention.

Rent-seeking models of international competition: An experimental investigation

This paper experimentally tests a number of hypotheses that follow from models of international competition that are based on Tullock style rent‐seeking models. Specifically, we designed and performed experiments to see how variations in the degree of publicness in the prize as well as changes in the values assigned to the prize affect alliances in terms of individual nation contributions, total contributions, burden sharing, and the likelihood of winning the prize. While there was substantial variation in individual behavior, the results of the experiments generally conform to the theoretical predictions of the rent‐seeking model of international competition and alliances.