Related papers: Optimal Prize Design in Parallel Rank-order Contes…
Mechanism design is a well-established game-theoretic paradigm for designing games to achieve desired outcomes. This paper addresses a closely related but distinct concept, equilibrium design. Unlike mechanism design, the designer's…
We study contests where the designer's objective is an extension of the widely studied objective of maximizing the total output: The designer gets zero marginal utility from a player's output if the output of the player is very low or very…
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…
This paper introduces a contest-theoretic simplified model of triathlon as a sequential two-stage game. In Stage 1 (post-swim), participants decide whether to continue or withdraw from the contest, thereby generating an endogenous…
We consider two-player contests with the possibility of ties and study the effect of different tie-breaking rules on effort. For ratio-form and difference-form contests that admit pure-strategy Nash equilibrium, we find that the effort of…
I study symmetric competitions in which each player chooses an arbitrary distribution over a one-dimensional performance index, subject to a convex cost. I establish existence of a symmetric equilibrium, document various properties it must…
Within the framework of Game Theory, contests study decision-making in those situations or conflicts when rewards depend on the relative rank between contenders rather than their absolute performance. By relying on the formalism of Tullock…
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…
This paper investigates design of noncooperative games from an optimization and control theoretic perspective. Pricing mechanisms are used as a design tool to ensure that the Nash equilibrium of a fairly general class of noncooperative…
Two-vehicle racing is natural example of a competitive dynamic game. As with most dynamic games, there are many ways in which the underlying solution concept can be structured, resulting in different equilibrium concepts. The assumed…
We study experimentally contests in which players make investment decisions sequentially, and information on prior investments is revealed between stages. Using a between-subject design, we consider all possible sequences in contests of…
Having fixed capacities, homogeneous products and price sensitive customer purchase decision are primary distinguishing characteristics of numerous revenue management systems. Even with two or three rivals, competition is still highly…
This paper considers a two-player game where each player chooses a resource from a finite collection of options. Each resource brings a random reward. Both players have statistical information regarding the rewards of each resource.…
We consider the problem in which n items arrive to a market sequentially over time, where two agents compete to choose the best possible item. When an agent selects an item, he leaves the market and obtains a payoff given by the value of…
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…
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…
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…
This paper considers a class of noncooperative games in which the feasible decision sets of all players are coupled together by a coupled inequality constraint. Adopting the variational inequality formulation of the game, we first introduce…
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…
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…