{"title":"Contest divisioning","authors":"Philip Brookins, Paan Jindapon","doi":"10.1007/s10058-022-00311-9","DOIUrl":null,"url":null,"abstract":"<p>In this paper, we ask a fundamental design question in the theory of contests: Should contestants and reward money be pooled into a single grand contest, or should they be divided into parallel subcontests? We theoretically explore optimal divisioning using Tullock’s lottery contest framework and compare the performance, i.e., total effort generated, of the grand contest to the performance of contest divisioning based on players’ ability or risk attitude. When all players are risk neutral, contest divisioning is never optimal. However, given that players are heterogeneous in either ability or risk attitude, we find that contest divisioning is optimal when the degrees of absolute risk aversion are sufficiently large. Importantly, our results support the widespread use of divisioning seen in practice.</p>","PeriodicalId":44537,"journal":{"name":"Review of Economic Design","volume":"8 7","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.3000,"publicationDate":"2022-08-12","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":"0","resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":null,"PeriodicalName":"Review of Economic Design","FirstCategoryId":"96","ListUrlMain":"https://doi.org/10.1007/s10058-022-00311-9","RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"经济学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":null,"EPubDate":"","PubModel":"","JCR":"Q4","JCRName":"ECONOMICS","Score":null,"Total":0}
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Abstract
In this paper, we ask a fundamental design question in the theory of contests: Should contestants and reward money be pooled into a single grand contest, or should they be divided into parallel subcontests? We theoretically explore optimal divisioning using Tullock’s lottery contest framework and compare the performance, i.e., total effort generated, of the grand contest to the performance of contest divisioning based on players’ ability or risk attitude. When all players are risk neutral, contest divisioning is never optimal. However, given that players are heterogeneous in either ability or risk attitude, we find that contest divisioning is optimal when the degrees of absolute risk aversion are sufficiently large. Importantly, our results support the widespread use of divisioning seen in practice.
期刊介绍：
Review of Economic Design comprises the creative art and science of inventing, analyzing and testing economic as well as social and political institutions and mechanisms aimed at achieving individual objectives and social goals. In this age of Economic Design, the accumulated traditions and wealth of knowledge in normative and positive economics and the strategic analysis of game theory are applied with novel ideas in the creative tasks of designing and assembling diverse legal-economic instruments. These include constitutions and other assignments of rights, mechanisms for allocation or regulation, tax and incentive schemes, contract forms, voting and other choice aggregation procedures, markets, auctions, organizational forms, such as partnerships, together with supporting membership and other property rights, and information systems. These designs, the methods of analysis used in their scrutiny, as well as the mathematical techniques and empirical knowledge they employ, along with comparative assessments of the performance of known economic systems and implemented designs, all of these form natural components of the subject matter of Economic Design.
Officially cited as: Rev Econ Design
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