We study a contest with multiple (not necessarily equal) prizes. Contestants have private information about an ability parameter that affects their costs of bidding. The contestant with the highest bid wins the first prize, the contestant with the second-highest bid wins the second prize, and so on until all the prizes are allocated. All contestants incur their respective costs of bidding. The contest's designer maximizes the expected sum of bids. Our main results are: 1) We display bidding equlibria for any number of contestants having linear, convex or concave cost functions, and for any distribution of abilities. 2) If the cost functions are linear or concave, then, no matter what the distribution of abilities is, it is optimal for the designer to allocate the entire prize sum to a single ''first'' prize. 3) We give a necessary and sufficient conditions ensuring that several prizes are optimal if contestants have a convex cost function.

The Optimal Allocation of Prizes in Contests

Many economic, political and social environments can be described as contests in which agents exert costly efforts while competing over the distribution of a scarce resource. These environments have been studied using Tullock contests, all-pay auctions and rank-order tournaments. This survey provides a review of experimental research on these three canonical contests. First, we review studies investigating the basic structure of contests, including the contest success function, number of players and prizes, spillovers and externalities, heterogeneity, and incomplete information. Second, we discuss dynamic contests and multi-battle contests. Then we review research on sabotage, feedback, bias, collusion, alliances, and contests between groups, as well as real-effort and field experiments. Finally, we discuss applications of contests to the study of legal systems, political competition, war, conflict avoidance, sales, and charities, and suggest directions for future research.

/pdf/a-survey-of-experimental-research-on-contests-all-pay-1lqd8ahh9f.pdf

A Survey of Experimental Research on Contests, All-Pay Auctions and Tournaments

Color is a ubiquitous perceptual stimulus that is often considered in terms of aesthetics. Here we review theoretical and empirical work that looks beyond color aesthetics to the link between color and psychological functioning in humans. We begin by setting a historical context for research in this area, particularly highlighting methodological issues that hampered earlier empirical work. We proceed to overview theoretical and methodological advances during the past decade and conduct a review of emerging empirical findings. Our empirical review focuses especially on color in achievement and affiliation/attraction contexts, but it also covers work on consumer behavior as well as food and beverage evaluation and consumption. The review clearly shows that color can carry important meaning and can have an important impact on people's affect, cognition, and behavior. The literature remains at a nascent stage of development, however, and we note that considerable work on boundary conditions, moderators, and r...

Color Psychology: Effects of Perceiving Color on Psychological Functioning in Humans

Many economic, political and social environments can be described as contests in which agents exert costly effort while competing over the distribution of a scarce resource. These environments have been studied using Tullock contests, all-pay auctions and rank-order tournaments. This survey provides a comprehensive review of experimental research on these three canonical contests. First, we review studies investigating the basic structure of contests, including the number of players and prizes, spillovers and externalities, heterogeneity, risk and incomplete information. Second, we discuss dynamic contests and multi-battle contests. Then we review studies examining sabotage, feedback, bias, collusion, alliances, group contests and gender, as well as field experiments. Finally, we discuss applications of contests and suggest directions for future research.

/pdf/a-survey-of-experimental-research-on-contests-all-pay-ajzmx5zmz1.pdf

A survey of experimental research on contests, all-pay auctions and tournaments

Innovation contests as a means to realize innovative product or service solutions are growing in popularity among practitioners and researchers. An increasing number of organizations worldwide have adopted innovation contests, not only for innovation purposes, but also for other reasons such as promoting sustainability. At the same time, innovation contests represent a growing research field to scholars from different backgrounds, e.g., economics or information systems. In this article, first, the growing body of literature on innovation contests is reviewed and classified into five research categories: economic perspective, management perspective, education focus, innovation focus and sustainability focus. Second, some design elements of innovation contests that are central for the understanding, design and management of innovation contests are presented based on the current body of literature. Finally, current research gaps are presented and some of the research questions are developed that could be explored to contribute to the body of literature.

https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/Delivery.cfm/caim12003.pdf?abstractid=2182912&mirid=5

Innovation Contests: A Review, Classification and Outlook

We study all-pay contests with effort-dependent rewards under incomplete information A contestant's value to winning depends not only on his type but also on the effort-dependent reward chosen by the designer We analyze which reward is optimal for the designer when his objective is either total effort or highest effort We find that under certain conditions the optimal reward may either be negative or even decreasing in effort; however, we find no advantage to having multiple rewards

/pdf/optimal-rewards-in-contests-3791wlpp8y.pdf

Optimal rewards in contests

A game theory-based assessment of the implementation of green building in Israel

We study all-pay contests under incomplete information where the reward is a function of the contestant's type and effort. We analyze the optimal reward for the designer when the reward is either multiplicatively separable or additively separable in effort and type. In the multiplicatively separable environment, the optimal reward is always positive while in the additively separable environment it may also be negative. In both environments, depending on the designer's utility, the optimal reward may either increase or decrease in the contestants' effort. Finally, in both environments, the designer's payoff depends only upon the expected value of the effort-dependent rewards and not the number of rewards.

Optimal Rewards in Contests

We study the classical Tullock's model of one-stage contests where the probability of winning is a function of the efforts exerted by the contestants. We show that by a simple non-discriminating rule, the contest designer is able to manipulate the outcome of the contest such that the probabilities to win are not ordered according to the contestants' abilities.

Chen Cohen

Papers

Optimal rewards in contests

A game theory-based assessment of the implementation of green building in Israel

Optimal Rewards in Contests

Manipulations in Contests

Manipulations in contests