Differential treatment and the winner's effort in contests with incomplete information

• 成果类型: Article
• 署名作者: Wasser, Cedric; Zhang, Mengxi
• 署名单位: University of Basel; University of Bonn
• 刊物名称: GAMES AND ECONOMIC BEHAVIOR
• ISSN/ISSBN: 0899-8256
• DOI: 10.1016/j.geb.2022.12.004
• 发表日期: 2023
• 页码: 90-111
• 关键词: Contests; all-pay auction; favoritism; Winner?s effort; mechanism design

摘要

We study the design of all-pay contests when the organizer's objective is to maximize the expected winner's effort and contestants have private information about their valua-tions for the prize. We identify sufficient conditions for every optimal contest to involve differential treatment of ex ante symmetric contestants. Moreover, we provide a complete characterization of optimal contests when valuations are uniformly distributed. Finally, our results for the winner's effort also imply that differential treatment is even more likely to benefit the organizer when her objective is to maximize the expected highest effort.(c) 2022 The Author(s). Published by Elsevier Inc. This is an open access article under the CC BY license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).