Related papers: Submission Fees in Risk-Taking Contests

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…

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…

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…

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 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…

There is a growing body of work on sorting and selection in models other than the unit-cost comparison model. This work is the first treatment of a natural stochastic variant of the problem where the cost of comparing two elements is a…

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…

I study optimal disclosure policies in sequential contests. A contest designer chooses at which periods to publicly disclose the efforts of previous contestants. I provide results for a wide range of possible objectives for the contest…

We study tournaments where winning a rank-dependent prize requires passing a minimum performance standard. We show that, for any prize allocation, the optimal standard is always at a mode of performance that is weakly higher than the global…

In many social computing applications such as online Q&A forums, the best contribution for each task receives some high reward, while all remaining contributions receive an identical, lower reward irrespective of their actual qualities.…

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…

We consider a stochastic online problem where $n$ applicants arrive over time, one per time step. Upon arrival of each applicant their cost per time step is revealed, and we have to fix the duration of employment, starting immediately. This…

We study how increasing competition, by making prizes more unequal, affects effort in contests. In a finite type-space environment, we characterize the equilibrium, analyze the effect of competition under linear costs, and identify…

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…

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…

This paper studies a risk-sensitive decision-making problem under uncertainty. It considers a decision-making process that unfolds over a fixed number of stages, in which a decision-maker chooses among multiple alternatives, some of which…

We introduce a general framework for continuous-time betting markets, in which a bookmaker can dynamically control the prices of bets on outcomes of random events. In turn, the prices set by the bookmaker affect the rate or intensity of…

Many early order flow auction designs handle the payment for orders when they execute on the chain rather than when they are won in the auction. Payments in these auctions only take place when the orders are executed, creating a free option…

With an exploding global market and the recent introduction of online cash prize tournaments, fantasy sports contests are quickly becoming a central part of the social gaming and sports industries. For sports fans and online media…

We consider designing reward schemes that incentivize agents to create high-quality content (e.g., videos, images, text, ideas). The problem is at the center of a real-world application where the goal is to optimize the overall quality of…