Public Leaderboard Feedback in Sampling Competition: An Experimental Investigation

We investigate the role of performance feedback, in the form of a public leaderboard, in a sequential-sampling contest with costly observations. We show theoretically that for contests with a fixed ending date (i.e., finite horizon), providing public performance feedback may result in fewer expected observations and a lower expected value of the winning observation. We conduct a controlled laboratory experiment to test the theoretical predictions, and find that the experimental results largely support the theory. In addition, we investigate how individual characteristics affect competitive sequential-sampling activity.