Team Contests with Multiple Pairwise Battles∗

We study a contest between two teams. The teams include an equal number of players. Each player of a team participates in a component battle, competing against a matched rival from the other team. A team wins if and only if its players prevail in a suffi ciently large number of component battles. The winning team is awarded a prize, which is a public good for all its players. In addition, a player may receive a private reward by winning his own battle, regardless of the win or loss of his team. We demonstrate in an all-pay-auction setting that the “strategic-momentum effect” or “discouragement effect” identified in individual multi-battle contests does not appear in team contests. The outcomes of past battles do not distort the stochastic outcomes of future plays. In addition, neither the bidding effi ciency nor the stochastic outcome of the contest depends on the temporal structure of the contest, i.e., the sequencing or clustering of component battles, or the prevailing information disclosure and feedback policy. These results yield rich implications for contest design and policy experimentation. The main results and their logic remain valid in a wide array of alternative settings. JEL Nos: C7, D7