Disclosure and Favoritism in Sequential Elimination Contests

• 成果类型: Article
• 署名作者: Fu, Qiang; Wu, Zenan
• 署名单位: National University of Singapore; Peking University
• 刊物名称: AMERICAN ECONOMIC JOURNAL-MICROECONOMICS
• ISSN/ISSBN: 1945-7669
• DOI: 10.1257/mic.20200230
• 发表日期: 2022
• 页码: 78-121
• 关键词: Rent-seeking; lottery contests; biased contests; optimal-design; tournaments; feedback; INFORMATION; prizes

摘要

We consider a two-stage contest, in which only a subset of contestants enters the finale. We explore the optimal policy for disclosing con-testants' interim status after the preliminary round, i.e., their interim ranking and elimination decision. The optimum depends on the design objective. We fully characterize the conditions under which disclo-sure or concealment emerges as the optimum. We further allow the organizer to bias the competition based on finalists' interim rankings, which endogenizes the dynamic structure of the contest. Concealment outperforms in generating total effort, while disclosure prevails when maximizing the expected winner's total effort. (JEL C72, L22)