Effort Decisions in Contests with Shared Attributes

• 成果类型: Article; Early Access
• 署名作者: He, Jiahao; Zhang, Jiheng; Zhang, Rachel Q.
• 署名单位: Hong Kong University of Science & Technology
• 刊物名称: MATHEMATICS OF OPERATIONS RESEARCH
• ISSN/ISSBN: 0364-765X
• DOI: 10.1287/moor.2023.0285
• 发表日期: 2025
• 关键词: colonel-blotto; INNOVATION; games; incentives

摘要

Individuals and organizations often face contests that require various skills, which can be developed through time and resource investments. Consider homogeneous contestants participating in multiple contests, each with multiple attributes and a reward for the winner or shared equally in case of a tie. Contestants can invest effort, at a cost, to enhance their skills in these attributes to maximize their expected net gain. Because contests may share some attributes while having unique ones, improving one attribute can impact winning chances differently across contests. This makes deciding how to allocate effort to each attribute a complex challenge. By reformulating the problem, we combine the effects of a contestant's efforts into their expected scores in the contests, simplifying the problem from many attributes to just the number of contests. We find that with two contests, contestants generally adopt a mixed strategy unless the contests are highly random. In less random scenarios, they tend to use more varied mixed strategies. The overall randomness of the equilibrium strategy closely resembles that of the mixed strategy in deterministic contests. We extend some of our analytical results and propose simple heuristic strategies for multiple contests, and we shed light on strategies for contestants with diverse skills.