Related papers: Contest Architecture with Public Disclosures
I study sequential contests where the efforts of earlier players may be disclosed to later players by nature or by design. The model has a range of applications, including rent seeking, R&D, oligopoly, public goods provision, and tragedy of…
This paper proposes a dynamic research contest, namely chasing contest, in which two asymmetric contestants exert costly effort to accomplish two breakthroughs. The contestants are asymmetric in that one of them is present-biased and has…
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.…
We study information disclosure policies for contests among groups. Each player endogenously decides whether or not to participate in competition as a member of their group. Within-group aggregation of effort is best-shot, i.e., each…
We study competition among contests in a general model that allows for an arbitrary and heterogeneous space of contest design, where the goal of the contest designers is to maximize the contestants' sum of efforts. Our main result shows…
We study experimentally contests in which players make investment decisions sequentially, and information on prior investments is revealed between stages. Using a between-subject design, we consider all possible sequences in contests of…
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 investigate the model of multiple contests held in parallel, where each contestant selects one contest to join and each contest designer decides the prize structure to compete for the participation of contestants. We first analyze the…
This paper explores the design of contests involving $n$ contestants, focusing on how the designer decides on the number of contestants allowed and the prize structure with a fixed budget. We characterize the unique symmetric Bayesian Nash…
In the contest design problem, there are $n$ strategic contestants, each of whom decides an effort level. A contest designer with a fixed budget must then design a mechanism that allocates a prize $p_i$ to the $i$-th rank based on the…
We study a model of dynamic two-stage R&D competition where the competing firms are uncertain about the difficulty of the first stage. Staying in the competition is costly and a firm can also choose whether and when to quit. When a firm…
Incentives are more likely to elicit desired outcomes when they are designed based on accurate models of agents' strategic behavior. A growing literature, however, suggests that people do not quite behave like standard economic agents in a…
I study how organizations assign tasks to identify the best candidate to promote among a pool of workers. Task allocation and workers' motivation interact through the organization's promotion decisions. The organization designs the workers'…
I study symmetric competitions in which each player chooses an arbitrary distribution over a one-dimensional performance index, subject to a convex cost. I establish existence of a symmetric equilibrium, document various properties it must…
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…
We study the design of effort-maximizing grading schemes between agents with private abilities. Assuming agents derive value from the information their grade reveals about their ability, we find that more informative grading schemes induce…
This paper studies the optimal mechanism to motivate effort in a dynamic principal-agent model without transfers. An agent is engaged in a task with uncertain future rewards and can quit at any time. The principal knows the reward and…
We study the design and approximation of optimal crowdsourcing contests. Crowdsourcing contests can be modeled as all-pay auctions because entrants must exert effort up-front to enter. Unlike all-pay auctions where a usual design objective…
The goal of this paper is to share our experience in designing and organizing educational competitions with anonymous and (near) real-time leaderboards in both academic and industrial settings. While such competitions serve as a great…
Collaborative competitions have gained popularity in the scientific and technological fields. These competitions involve defining tasks, selecting evaluation scores, and devising result verification methods. In the standard scenario,…