Time Discounting in Strategic Contests

In many contests, such as political campaigns or R&D expenditures, there is at least some trade-off between immediate money outlay and potential future benefits. This timing aspect has mostly been ignored by the contest literature. If contestants exhibit a strong present bias, such as that shown by past individual choice experiments, then benefits that are deferred to the future will lead to a significant drop in investment. This paper uses controlled laboratory experiments to explore how the timing of prize payment impacts behavior in a contest with a unique Nash equilibrium strategy. We find no evidence that people significantly discount future prizes in our contests, despite the fact that we do replicate present bias in a separate individual choice experiment.