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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…
I study optimal disclosure policies in sequential contests. A contest designer chooses at which periods to publicly disclose the efforts of previous contestants. I provide results for a wide range of possible objectives for the contest…
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…
Shortlisting is the task of reducing a long list of alternatives to a (smaller) set of best or most suitable alternatives. Shortlisting is often used in the nomination process of awards or in recommender systems to display featured objects.…
Shortlisting is the process of selecting a subset of alternatives from a larger pool for further consideration or final decision-making. It is widely applied in social choice and multi-agent system scenarios. The growing demand for…
We study the design of effort-maximizing grading schemes between agents with private abilities. Assuming agents derive value from the information their grade reveals about their ability, we find that more informative grading schemes induce…
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 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…
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…
Selective contests can impair participants' overall welfare in overcompetitive environments, such as school admissions. This paper models the situation as an optimal contest design problem with binary actions, treating effort costs as…
Collaborative competitions have gained popularity in the scientific and technological fields. These competitions involve defining tasks, selecting evaluation scores, and devising result verification methods. In the standard scenario,…
Motivated by online platforms such as job markets, we study an agent choosing from a list of candidates, each with a hidden quality that determines match value. The agent observes only a noisy ranking of the candidates plus a binary signal…
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…
Selective labels are a common feature of consequential decision-making applications, referring to the lack of observed outcomes under one of the possible decisions. This paper reports work in progress on learning decision policies in the…
We study information disclosure policies for contests among groups. Each player endogenously decides whether or not to participate in competition as a member of their group. Within-group aggregation of effort is best-shot, i.e., each…
Tournaments are frequently used incentive mechanisms to enhance performance. In this paper, we use field data and show that skill disparities among contestants asymmetrically affect the performance of contestants. Skill disparities have…
The plethora of comparison shopping agents (CSAs) in today's markets enables buyers to query more than a single CSA when shopping, and an inter-CSAs competition naturally arises. We suggest a new approach, termed "selective price…
We study a tractable two-player contest built on a truncated cubic contest success function. Its defining feature is a strategic-feedback parameter whose sign determines whether a leading player's effort lowers (suppression) or raises…
Tournaments are a widely used mechanism to rank alternatives in a noisy environment. This paper investigates a fundamental issue of economics in tournament design: what is the best usage of limited resources, that is, how should the…
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…