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Related papers: Contests to Incentivize a Target Group

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We consider the design of experiments to evaluate treatments that are administered by self-interested agents, each seeking to achieve the highest evaluation and win the experiment. For example, in an advertising experiment, a company wishes…

Methodology · Statistics 2015-09-18 Panos Toulis , David C. Parkes , Elery Pfeffer , James Zou

We study how to allocate resources to participants who can strategically misrepresent their deservingness at a cost. A principal assigns item(s) (or money) among multiple agents on the basis of their costly signals. Each agent's signal…

Theoretical Economics · Economics 2026-03-05 Yingkai Li , Xiaoyun Qiu

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…

Theoretical Economics · Economics 2026-03-31 Siyuan Fan , Zhonghong Kuang , Jingfeng Lu

We study a setting in which a principal selects an agent to execute a collection of tasks according to a specified priority sequence. Agents, however, have their own individual priority sequences according to which they wish to execute the…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2024-10-30 Donya G. Dobakhshari , Lav R. Varshney , Vijay Gupta

How does competition in markets for information affect the creation and division of surplus? We study this question in a search environment in which an agent searches sequentially for a high-quality good and learns about the quality of…

Theoretical Economics · Economics 2026-05-26 Teddy Mekonnen , Bobak Pakzad-Hurson

We consider quadratic, nonmonotone generalized Nash equilibrium problems with symmetric interactions among the agents. Albeit this class of games is known to admit a potential function, its formal expression can be unavailable in several…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2022-03-31 Filippo Fabiani , Andrea Simonetto , Paul J. Goulart

We investigate the effects of competition in a problem of resource extraction from a common source with diffusive dynamics. In the symmetric version with identical extraction rates we prove the existence of a Nash equilibrium where the…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2021-06-10 Erik Ekström , Kristoffer Lindensjö

Agents attempt to maximize expected profits earned by selling multiple units of a perishable product where their revenue streams are affected by the prices they quote as well as the distribution of other prices quoted in the market by other…

Trading and Market Microstructure · Quantitative Finance 2025-04-16 Ryan Donnelly , Zi Li

To regulate a social system comprised of self-interested agents, economic incentives are often required to induce a desirable outcome. This incentive design problem naturally possesses a bilevel structure, in which a designer modifies the…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2022-10-14 Boyi Liu , Jiayang Li , Zhuoran Yang , Hoi-To Wai , Mingyi Hong , Yu Marco Nie , Zhaoran Wang

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…

Theoretical Economics · Economics 2024-12-03 Mikhail Drugov , Dmitry Ryvkin , Jun Zhang

We apply control theoretic and optimization techniques to adaptively design incentives. In particular, we consider the problem of a planner with an objective that depends on data from strategic decision makers. The planner does not know the…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2018-06-18 Lillian J. Ratliff , Tanner Fiez

Influential benchmarks incentivize competing model developers to strategically allocate post-training resources toward improvements on the leaderboard, a phenomenon dubbed benchmaxxing or training on the test task. In this work, we initiate…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2026-03-10 Yatong Chen , Guanhua Zhang , Moritz Hardt

Winners-take-all situations introduce an incentive for agents to diversify their behavior, since doing so will result in splitting an eventual price with fewer people. At the same time, when the payoff of a process depends on a parameter…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2019-06-11 Abel Molina

Participation incentives is a well-known issue inhibiting randomized controlled trials (RCTs) in medicine, as well as a potential cause of user dissatisfaction for RCTs in online platforms. We frame this issue as a non-standard…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2026-01-13 Yingkai Li , Aleksandrs Slivkins

The overall aim of our research is to develop techniques to reason about the equilibrium properties of multi-agent systems. We model multi-agent systems as concurrent games, in which each player is a process that is assumed to act…

Logic in Computer Science · Computer Science 2020-08-14 Julian Gutierrez , Aniello Murano , Giuseppe Perelli , Sasha Rubin , Thomas Steeples , Michael Wooldridge

The distribution of efficient individuals in the economy and the efforts that they will put in if they are hired, there are two important concerns for a technologically advanced firm. wants to open a new branch. The firm does not have…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2025-01-27 Sujata Goala , Mridu Prabal Goswami , Surajit Borkotokey

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…

Theoretical Economics · Economics 2026-04-28 Emre Ozdenoren , Murat Erkurt

Approximate Competitive Equilibrium from Equal Incomes (A-CEEI) is an equilibrium-based solution concept for fair division of discrete items to agents with combinatorial demands. In theory, it is known that in asymptotically large markets:…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2023-06-01 Eric Budish , Ruiquan Gao , Abraham Othman , Aviad Rubinstein , Qianfan Zhang

We study the design of optimal incentives in sequential processes. To do so, we consider a basic and fundamental model in which an agent initiates a value-creating sequential process through costly investment with random success. If…

Theoretical Economics · Economics 2023-11-22 Jens Gudmundsson , Jens Leth Hougaard , Juan D. Moreno-Ternero , Lars Peter Østerdal

In this paper we study variations of the standard Hotelling-Downs model of spatial competition, where each agent attracts the clients in a restricted neighborhood, each client randomly picks one attractive agent for service. Two utility…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2016-11-21 Weiran Shen , Zihe Wang