Related papers: Balancing Selection Efficiency and Societal Costs …
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…
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…
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.…
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…
We study a participatory budgeting problem of aggregating the preferences of agents and dividing a budget over the projects. A budget division solution is a probability distribution over the projects. The main purpose of our study concerns…
This paper investigates stochastic continuous time contests with a twist: the designer requires that contest participants incur some cost to submit their entries. When the designer wishes to maximize the (expected) performance of the top…
Institutions can provide incentives to increase cooperation behaviour in a population where this behaviour is infrequent. This process is costly, and it is thus important to optimize the overall spending. This problem can be mathematically…
Research on promoting cooperation among autonomous, self-regarding agents has often focused on the bi-objective optimisation problem: minimising the total incentive cost while maximising the frequency of cooperation. However, the optimal…
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 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…
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…
Allocating conflicting jobs among individuals while respecting a budget constraint for each individual is an optimization problem that arises in various real-world scenarios. In this paper, we consider the situation where each individual…
Meritocratic systems, from admissions to hiring, aim to impartially reward skill and effort. Yet persistent disparities across race, gender, and class challenge this ideal. Some attribute these gaps to structural inequality; others to…
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…
Strategic classification studies the design of a classifier robust to the manipulation of input by strategic individuals. However, the existing literature does not consider the effect of competition among individuals as induced by the…
To successfully navigate its environment, an agent must construct and maintain representations of the other agents that it encounters. Such representations are useful for many tasks, but they are not without cost. As a result, agents must…
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…
In this paper, we rigorously study the problem of cost optimisation of hybrid (mixed) institutional incentives, which are a plan of actions involving the use of reward and punishment by an external decision-maker, for maximising the level…
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…
Consequential decision-making typically incentivizes individuals to behave strategically, tailoring their behavior to the specifics of the decision rule. A long line of work has therefore sought to counteract strategic behavior by designing…