Related papers: Suppression and Empowerment in Contests
We consider a symmetric two-player contest, in which the choice set of effort is constrained. We apply a fundamental property of the payoff function to show that, under standard assumptions, there exists a unique Nash equilibrium in pure…
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 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…
This paper is devoted to a high-dimensional mixed leadership stochastic differential game on a finite horizon in feedback information mode, where the control variables enter into the diffusion term of state equation. A verification theorem…
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.…
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…
We introduce and study incentive equilibria for multi-player meanpayoff games. Incentive equilibria generalise well-studied solution concepts such as Nash equilibria and leader equilibria (also known as Stackelberg equilibria). Recall that…
Preference optimization is widely used to align large language models (LLMs) with human preferences. However, many margin-based methods also suppress the chosen response when they try to suppress the rejected one, and there is no general…
We study an all-pay contest in which players with low abilities are filtered out before competing for prizes. We consider a setting where the designer admits a certain number of top players. The admitted players update their beliefs based…
In competitive resource allocation, a central coordinator may seek to gain an advantage not by directly controlling subordinate agents, but by strategically manipulating the information they receive. We study this problem within the…
We consider a contest game modelling a contest where reviews for $m$ proposals are crowdsourced from $n$ strategic agents} players. Player $i$ has a skill $s_{i\ell}$ for reviewing proposal $\ell$; for her review, she strategically chooses…
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…
Influential benchmarks incentivize competing model developers to strategically allocate post-training resources toward improvements on the leaderboard, a phenomenon dubbed benchmaxxing or training on the test task. In this work, we initiate…
Patterns of wins and losses in pairwise contests, such as occur in sports and games, consumer research and paired comparison studies, and human and animal social hierarchies, are commonly analyzed using probabilistic models that allow one…
We analyze a class of stochastic dynamic games among teams with asymmetric information, where members of a team share their observations internally with a delay of $d$. Each team is associated with a controlled Markov Chain, whose dynamics…
In a crowdsourcing contest, a principal holding a task posts it to a crowd. People in the crowd then compete with each other to win the rewards. Although in real life, a crowd is usually networked and people influence each other via social…
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…
Shortlisting is a common and effective method for pre-selecting participants in competitive settings. To ensure fairness, a cut-off score is typically announced, allowing only contestants who exceed it to enter the contest, while others are…
This paper proposes a dynamic research contest, namely chasing contest, in which two asymmetric contestants exert costly effort to accomplish two breakthroughs. The contestants are asymmetric in that one of them is present-biased and has…
We propose a toy model for a stochastic description of the competition between two athletes of unequal strength, whose average strength difference is represented by a parameter $d$. The athletes interact through the choice of their…