Related papers: Tournaments with a Standard
We characterize robust tournament design -- the prize scheme that maximizes the lowest effort in a rank-order tournament where the distribution of noise is unknown, except for an upper bound, $\bar{H}$, on its Shannon entropy. The robust…
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…
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…
Given the final ranking of a competition, how should the total prize endowment be allocated among the competitors? We study consistent prize allocation rules satisfying elementary solidarity and fairness principles. In particular, we…
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 $n$-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…
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…
We investigate the problem of designing optimal classifiers in the strategic classification setting, where the classification is part of a game in which players can modify their features to attain a favorable classification outcome (while…
Following the risk-taking model of Seel and Strack, $n$ players decide when to stop privately observed Brownian motions with drift and absorption at zero. They are then ranked according to their level of stopping and paid a rank-dependent…
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 characterize the optimal reward functions (scoring rules) that incentivize an agent to acquire information and report it truthfully to the principal. The optimal scoring rules let the agent make a simple binary bet in single-dimensional…
We study buyer-optimal procurement mechanisms when quality is contractible. When some costs are borne by every participant of a procurement auction regardless of winning, the classic analysis should be amended. We show that an optimal…
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…
We study how to incentivize agents in a target group to produce a higher output in the context of incomplete information, by means of rank-order allocation contests. We describe a symmetric Bayes--Nash equilibrium for contests that have two…
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…
A principal uses payments conditioned on stochastic outcomes of a team project to elicit costly effort from the team members. We develop a multi-agent generalization of a classic first-order approach to contract optimization by leveraging…
I study the optimal design of ratings to motivate agent investment in quality when transfers are unavailable. The principal designs a rating scheme that maps the agent's quality to a (possibly stochastic) score. The agent has private…
We study statistics of the knockout tournament, where only the winner of a fixture progresses to the next. We assign a real number called competitiveness to each contestant and find that the resulting distribution of prize money follows a…
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…
Tournament solutions are standard tools for identifying winners based on pairwise comparisons between competing alternatives. The recently studied notion of margin of victory (MoV) offers a general method for refining the winner set of any…