Related papers: Distribution-Free Equilibrium in Search Contests
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…
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…
We consider games in which players search for a hidden prize, and they have asymmetric information about the prize location. We study the social payoff in equilibria of these games. We present sufficient conditions for the existence of an…
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.…
How does competition in markets for information affect the creation and division of surplus? We study this question in a search environment in which an agent searches sequentially for a high-quality good and learns about the quality of…
In lowest unique bid auctions, $N$ players bid for an item. The winner is whoever places the \emph{lowest} bid, provided that it is also unique. We use a grand canonical approach to derive an analytical expression for the equilibrium…
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…
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…
In this paper we formulate the fixed budget resource allocation game to understand the performance of a distributed market-based resource allocation system. Multiple users decide how to distribute their budget (bids) among multiple machines…
A variety of social, economic, and political interactions have long been modelled after Blotto games. In this paper, we introduce a general model of dynamic $n$-player Blotto contests. The players have asymmetric resources, and the…
We consider a game-theoretic setting in which selfish individuals compete over resources of varying quality. The motivating example is a group of animals that disperse over patches of food of different abundances. In such scenarios,…
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…
Assume that a treasure is placed in one of $M$ boxes according to a known distribution and that $k$ searchers are searching for it in parallel during $T$ rounds. We study the question of how to incentivize selfish players so that the…
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 problem of designing a two-sided market (double auction) to maximize the gains from trade (social welfare) under the constraints of (dominant-strategy) incentive compatibility and budget-balance. Our goal is to do so for an…
We study the classic divide-and-choose method for equitably allocating divisible goods between two players who are rational, self-interested Bayesian agents. The players have additive values for the goods. The prior distributions on those…
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…
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 seller who sells a single good to multiple bidders with uncertainty over the joint distribution of bidders' valuations, as well as bidders' higher-order beliefs about their opponents. The seller only knows the (possibly…
We study the effect of interim feedback policies in a dynamic all-pay auction where two players bid over two stages to win a common-value prize. We show that sequential equilibrium outcomes are characterized by Cheapest Signal Equilibria,…