College assignment as a large contest

Bodoh-Creed, Aaron; Hickman, Brent R.

doi:10.1016/j.jet.2018.01.006

Cited by 31 publications

(11 citation statements)

References 40 publications

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“…In contrast, in our homogeneous-contestant setting, coarsening a grading scheme (with no coarsening of the lowest grade) increases students' expected effort without affecting student welfare. See Dubey and Geanakoplos (2010) and Bodoh-Creed and Hickman (2018) for further discussions of how changes of grade structures affect students' effort. 29 For example, under Jack Welch's famous "20-70-10" employee ranking system, employees are ranked on the basis of performance evaluations.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Turning Up the Heat: The Discouraging Effect of Competition in Contests

Fang

Noe

Strack

2020

Journal of Political Economy

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We study contests in which contestants are homogeneous and have convex effort costs. Increasing contest competitiveness, by making prizes more unequal, scaling up the competition, or adding new contestants, always discourages effort. These results have significant implications: although often criticized as evidence of laxity or cronyism, muting competition (e.g., adopting softer grading curves or less highpowered promotion systems) can both reduce inequality and increase output. Holding promotion contests at the division level rather than the firm level can boost employees' effort. Our results are also consistent with personnel policies that feature egalitarian pay systems and dismissal of worst-performing employees.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Turning Up the Heat: The Discouraging Effect of Competition in Contests

Fang

Noe

Strack

2020

Journal of Political Economy

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“…Bodoh-Creed and Hickman [6] develop a model with heterogeneous students endogenously choosing effort in an admissions game; they use the model to compare various affirmative action schemes. Fang et al [14] find that increased competition (in form of either more contestants or more convex reward structure) decreases overall student effort.…”

Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

Strategic Ranking

Liu¹,

Garg²,

Borgs³

2021

Preprint

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Strategic classification studies the design of a classifier robust to the manipulation of input by strategic individuals. However, the existing literature does not consider the effect of competition among individuals as induced by the algorithm design. Motivated by constrained allocation settings such as college admissions, we introduce strategic ranking, in which the (designed) individual reward depends on an applicant's post-effort rank in a measurement of interest. Our results illustrate how competition among applicants affects the resulting equilibria and model insights. We analyze how various ranking reward designs trade off applicant, school, and societal utility and in particular how ranking design can counter inequities arising from disparate access to resources to improve one's measured score: We find that randomization in the ranking reward design can mitigate two measures of disparate impact, welfare gap and access, whereas non-randomization may induce a high level of competition that systematically excludes a disadvantaged group.

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“…They present a model in which there is a centralized allocation mechanism mapping each student's score into a seat at a college. Bodoh-Creed and Hickman (2016) are mostly interested in the effects of affirmative action policies and the solution concept used is "approximate equilibrium" in which the number of students is assumed to be large so that students approximately know their rankings within the realized sample of private costs. Similarly, Olszewski and Siegel (2014) consider contests with many players and prizes and show that the equilibrium outcomes of such contests are approximated by the outcomes of an appropriately defined set of mechanisms.…”

Section: Related Literaturementioning

confidence: 99%

College admissions with entrance exams: Centralized versus decentralized

Hafalır

Hakimov

Kübler

et al. 2018

Journal of Economic Theory

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College assignment as a large contest

Cited by 31 publications

References 40 publications

Turning Up the Heat: The Discouraging Effect of Competition in Contests

Turning Up the Heat: The Discouraging Effect of Competition in Contests

Strategic Ranking

College admissions with entrance exams: Centralized versus decentralized

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