Related papers: Optimal Sequential Contests
Shortlisting is a common and effective method for pre-selecting participants in competitive settings. To ensure fairness, a cut-off score is typically announced, allowing only contestants who exceed it to enter the contest, while others are…
We consider a repeated sequential game between a learner, who plays first, and an opponent who responds to the chosen action. We seek to design strategies for the learner to successfully interact with the opponent. While most previous…
We study $n$-dimensional contests between two players with heterogeneous effort costs, where each dimension (battle) is modeled as a Tullock contest. Prize-allocation rules are identity-independent, budget-balanced, and weakly increasing in…
The aim of this paper is threefold. First, we provide a unified framework, by means of non-trivial examples, to compare the results obtained in simultaneous-move and sequential-move versions of bilateral oligopoly with the Cournot model and…
Evolutionary game theory assumes that individuals maximize their benefits when choosing strategies. However, an alternative perspective proposes that individuals seek to maximize the benefits of others. To explore the relationship between…
We study the effects of randomness on competitions based on an elementary random process in which there is a finite probability that a weaker team upsets a stronger team. We apply this model to sports leagues and sports tournaments, and…
We demonstrate the usefulness of adding delay to infinite games with quantitative winning conditions. In a delay game, one of the players may delay her moves to obtain a lookahead on her opponent's moves. We show that determining the winner…
Many classification problems require decisions among a large number of competing classes. These tasks, however, are not handled well by general purpose learning methods and are usually addressed in an ad-hoc fashion. We suggest a general…
A seller with one unit of a good faces N\geq3 buyers and a single competitor who sells one other identical unit in a second-price auction with a reserve price. Buyers who do not get the seller's good will compete in the competitor's…
In a multi-battle contest, each time a player competes by investing some of her budgets or resources in a component battle to collect a value if winning the battle. There are multiple battles to fight, and the budgets get consumed over…
We study a contest in which $N$ players sequentially draw from a distribution as many times as they want at a fixed cost per draw, with no recall, and the highest accepted value wins a prize. In the unique symmetric equilibrium, the…
We study dynamic multi-battle contests and examine how the contest structure shapes dynamic incentives and determines the extent of rent dissipation. A discouragement effect often arises -- such as in tug-of-war and best-of-$K$ contests --…
Banks routinely use neural networks to make decisions. While these models offer higher accuracy, they are susceptible to adversarial attacks, a risk often overlooked in the context of event sequences, particularly sequences of financial…
A dynamical model for the distribution of resources between competing agents is studied. While global competition leads to the accumulation of all the resources by a single agent, local competition allows for a wider resource distribution.…
This paper investigates a two-stage game-theoretical model with multiple parallel rank-order contests. In this model, each contest designer sets up a contest and determines the prize structure within a fixed budget in the first stage.…
This work addresses competitive resource allocation in a sequential setting, where two players allocate resources across objects or locations of shared interest. Departing from the simultaneous Colonel Blotto game, our framework introduces…
We analyze strategic delegation in a Stackelberg model with an arbitrary number, n, of firms. We show that the n-1 last movers delegate their production decisions to managers whereas the first mover does not. Equilibrium incentive rates are…
This paper studies properties of the back end of a sorting network and illustrates the utility of these in the search for networks of optimal size or depth. All previous works focus on properties of the front end of networks and on how to…
Selective contests can impair participants' overall welfare in overcompetitive environments, such as school admissions. This paper models the situation as an optimal contest design problem with binary actions, treating effort costs as…
In fair division of indivisible goods, using sequences of sincere choices (or picking sequences) is a natural way to allocate the objects. The idea is as follows: at each stage, a designated agent picks one object among those that remain.…