Suppression and Empowerment in Contests
Abstract
We study a tractable two-player contest built on a truncated cubic contest success function. Its defining feature is a strategic-feedback parameter whose sign determines whether a leading player's effort lowers (suppression) or raises (empowerment) the marginal effectiveness of the trailing player's effort; standard lottery contests impose suppression by construction. The benchmark yields closed-form mixed equilibria under complete information and a unique affine Bayesian Nash equilibrium under IID private information. Expected effort is typically single-peaked in the feedback parameter. Uncertainty lowers effort under suppression but raises it under empowerment, and the same asymmetry governs information disclosure: an effort-maximizing designer withholds information under suppression and discloses fully under empowerment. Several familiar conclusions of contest theory turn out to reflect suppressive benchmarks rather than contests as such.
Cite
@article{arxiv.2605.26639,
title = {Suppression and Empowerment in Contests},
author = {Alexander Matros and Constantine Sorokin},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2605.26639},
year = {2026}
}