Optimal Feedback in Contests

• 成果类型: Article
• 署名作者: Ely, Jeffrey C.; Georgiadis, George; Khorasani, Sina; Rayo, Luis
• 署名单位: Northwestern University; University System of Ohio; University of Dayton
• 刊物名称: REVIEW OF ECONOMIC STUDIES
• ISSN/ISSBN: 0034-6527
• DOI: 10.1093/restud/rdac074
• 发表日期: 2023
• 页码: 2370-2394
• 关键词: tournaments; prizes

摘要

We obtain optimal dynamic contests for environments where the designer monitors effort through coarse, binary signals-Poisson successes-and aims to elicit maximum effort, ideally in the least amount of time possible, given a fixed prize. The designer has a vast set of contests to choose from, featuring termination and prize-allocation rules together with real-time feedback for the contestants. Every effort-maximizing contest (which also maximizes total expected successes) has a history-dependent termination rule, a feedback policy that keeps agents fully apprised of their own success, and a prize-allocation rule that grants them, in expectation, a time-invariant share of the prize if they succeed. Any contest that achieves this effort in the shortest possible time must in addition be what we call second chance: once a pre-specified number of successes arrive, the contest enters a countdown phase where contestants are given one last chance to succeed.