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The Optimal Allocation of Prizes in Contests
Abstract
We study a contest with multiple, nonidentical prizes. Participants are privately informed about a parameter (ability) affecting their costs of effort. The contestant with the highest effort wins the first prize, the contestant with the second-highest effort wins the second prize, and so on until all the prizes are allocated. The contest's designer maximizes expected effort. When cost functions are linear or concave in effort, it is optimal to allocate the entire prize sum to a single “first” prize. When cost functions are convex, several positive prizes may be optimal. (JEL D44, J31, D72, D82)
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Citations
Cited by
Incentives and Problem Uncertainty in Innovation Contests: An Empirical Analysis
Boudreau, K. J., Lacetera, N., & Lakhani, K. R. (2011) · Management Science · doi:10.1287/mnsc.1110.1322 · Cited by 830
The Economic Design of Sporting Contests
Szymanski, S. (2010) · The Comparative Economics of Sport · doi:10.1057/9780230274273_1 · Cited by 676
A survey of experimental research on contests, all-pay auctions and tournaments
Dechenaux, E., Kovenock, D., & Sheremeta, R. M. (2015) · Experimental Economics · doi:10.1007/s10683-014-9421-0 · Cited by 706
Optimal Design of Research Contests
Che, Y.-K., & Gale, I. (2003) · American Economic Review · doi:10.1257/000282803322157025 · Cited by 428
Ostrovsky, M., Schwarz, M., & Edelman, B. G. (2005) · SSRN Electronic Journal · doi:10.2139/ssrn.861164 · Cited by 333
Metadata
- Authors
- Moldovanu, B., & Sela, A.
- Venue
- American Economic Review
- Publisher
- American Economic Association
- Published
- 2001-06-01
- Volume
- 91
- Issue
- 3
- Pages
- 542-558
- ISSN
- 0002-8282 (ISSN-L)
- OpenAlex
- W2043634452
- Cited by
- 860
- References
- 0
- FWCI
- 21.59
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- closed
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