Related papers: Contests to Incentivize a Target Group

In competitive resource allocation, a central coordinator may seek to gain an advantage not by directly controlling subordinate agents, but by strategically manipulating the information they receive. We study this problem within 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…

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.…

Entities in multi-agent systems may seek conflicting subobjectives, and this leads to competition between them. To address performance degradation due to competition, we consider a bi-level lottery where a social planner at the high level…

In this paper, we consider the problem of a Principal aiming at designing a reward function for a population of heterogeneous agents. We construct an incentive based on the ranking of the agents, so that a competition among the latter is…

We study techniques to incentivize self-interested agents to form socially desirable solutions in scenarios where they benefit from mutual coordination. Towards this end, we consider coordination games where agents have different intrinsic…

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…

In a crowdsourcing contest, a principal holding a task posts it to a crowd. People in the crowd then compete with each other to win the rewards. Although in real life, a crowd is usually networked and people influence each other via social…

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…

Firms (businesses, service providers, entertainment organizations, political parties, etc.) advertise on social networks to draw people's attention and improve their awareness of the brands of the firms. In all such cases, the competitive…

We introduce a mean field game with rank-based reward: competing agents optimize their effort to achieve a goal, are ranked according to their completion time, and paid a reward based on their relative rank. First, we propose a tractable…

An extensive literature in economics and social science addresses contests, in which players compete to outperform each other on some measurable criterion, often referred to as a player's score, or output. Players incur costs that are an…

We study contests in which two groups compete to win (or not to win) a group-specific public-good/bad prize. Each player in the groups can exert two types of effort: one to help her own group win the prize, and one to sabotage her own…

Imitation is widely observed in populations of decision-making agents. Using our recent convergence results for asynchronous imitation dynamics on networks, we consider how such networks can be efficiently driven to a desired equilibrium…

We consider a stochastic tournament game in which each player is rewarded based on her rank in terms of the completion time of her own task and is subject to cost of effort. When players are homogeneous and the rewards are purely rank…

We consider a symmetric two-player contest, in which the choice set of effort is constrained. We apply a fundamental property of the payoff function to show that, under standard assumptions, there exists a unique Nash equilibrium in pure…

We study a general scenario of simultaneous contests that allocate prizes based on equal sharing: each contest awards its prize to all players who satisfy some contest-specific criterion, and the value of this prize to a winner decreases as…

We investigate both stationary and time-varying, nonmonotone generalized Nash equilibrium problems that exhibit symmetric interactions among the agents, which are known to be potential. As may happen in practical cases, however, we envision…

In crowdsourcing when there is a lack of verification for contributed answers, output agreement mechanisms are often used to incentivize participants to provide truthful answers when the correct answer is hold by the majority. In this…

We consider schemes for obtaining truthful reports on a common but hidden signal from large groups of rational, self-interested agents. One example are online feedback mechanisms, where users provide observations about the quality of a…