Related papers: Tournaments, Contestant Heterogeneity and Performa…
Bipartite matching problem is to study two disjoint groups of agents who need to be matched pairwise. It can be applied to many real-world scenarios and explain many social phenomena. In this article, we study the effect of competition on…
Individual sports competitions provide a natural setting for examining the relative importance of talent and luck/chance in achieving success. The belief that success is primarily due to individual abilities and hard work rather than…
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…
The role of skill (fitness) and luck (randomness) as driving forces on the dynamics of resource accumulation in a myriad of systems have long puzzled scientists. Fueled by undisputed inequalities that emerge from actual competitions, there…
We study the optimal allocation of prizes in rank-order tournaments with loss averse agents. Prize sharing becomes increasingly optimal with loss aversion because more equitable prizes reduce the marginal psychological cost of anticipated…
Patterns of wins and losses in pairwise contests, such as occur in sports and games, consumer research and paired comparison studies, and human and animal social hierarchies, are commonly analyzed using probabilistic models that allow one…
Sequential Social Dilemmas (SSDs) provide a key framework for studying how cooperation emerges when individual incentives conflict with collective welfare. In Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning, these problems are often addressed by…
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…
In most professional sports, the structure of the environment is kept neutral so that scoring imbalances may be attributed to differences in team skill. It thus remains unknown what impact structural heterogeneities can have on scoring…
We study how the design of admissions policies affects the ability of students admitted to universities. In our model, applicants have a multi-dimensional ability, which is a combination of a "type" and a "soft skill." Universities may…
Many set selection and ranking algorithms have recently been enhanced with diversity constraints that aim to explicitly increase representation of historically disadvantaged populations, or to improve the overall representativeness of the…
This paper aims to explore the impact of tournament design on the incentives of the contestants. We develop a simulation framework to quantify the potential gain and loss from attacking based on changes in the probability of reaching the…
When consequential decisions are informed by algorithmic input, individuals may feel compelled to alter their behavior in order to gain a system's approval. Models of agent responsiveness, termed "strategic manipulation," analyze the…
We study a stochastic process that mimics single-game elimination tournaments. In our model, the outcome of each match is stochastic: the weaker player wins with upset probability q<=1/2, and the stronger player wins with probability 1-q.…
This study investigates the effect of competition between individuals on population dynamics when they compete for different resources during different seasons or during different growth stages. Individuals are assumed to compete for a…
In this work the properties of multi choice minority games are studied by means of extensive computational simulations. We have considered several ways of rewarding the strategies of the players and compared the resulting behaviours of the…
Selective attention can momentarily alter visual appearance, but can such effects be learned? We tested whether training attention under sensory competition produces lasting changes in perceived contrast. Across seven days, participants…
We analyse a sequential contest with two players in darts where one of the contestants enjoys a technical advantage. Using methods from the causal machine learning literature, we analyse the built-in advantage, which is the first-mover…
Efforts to promote equity in higher education often rely on shared intent among instructors and students. Yet, as demonstrated in this study, when students form their own teams for Team-Based Learning (TBL) tasks, they unintentionally…
Deploying an algorithmically informed policy is a significant intervention in the structure of society. As is increasingly acknowledged, predictive algorithms have performative effects: using them can shift the distribution of social…