Incomplete information in rent-seeking contests

Wasser, Cédric

doi:10.1007/s00199-011-0688-5

Cited by 70 publications

(34 citation statements)

References 25 publications

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“…The all‐pay auction captures the notion that, conditional on expenditures, exogenous shocks do not play a significant role in determining a contest's outcome. Contests with exogenous noise, such as the Tullock () or Lazear and Rosen () models, generally require sufficient noise to ensure pure‐strategy equilibria in the complete information game; see Wasser () and Denter et al. () for studies concerning endogenous information in such models.…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

Information Sharing in Contests

Kovenock

Morath

Münster

2015

Economics Manag Strategy

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We study the incentives to share private information ahead of contests, such as markets with promotional competition, procurement contests, or R&D. We consider the cases where …rms have (i) independent values and (ii) common values of winning the contest. In both cases, when decisions to share information are made independently, sharing information is strictly dominated. With independent values, an industry-wide agreement to share information can arise in equilibrium. Expected e¤ort is lower with than without information sharing. With common values, an industry-wide agreement to share information never arises in equilibrium. Expected e¤ort is higher with than without information sharing.

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mentioning

confidence: 99%

Information Sharing in Contests

Kovenock

Morath

Münster

2015

Economics Manag Strategy

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“…This can be seen by normalizing payo¤ functions in the agent-normal form of the Bayesian contest game. Further, we conjecture that our results extend to the case of continuous type spaces (Fey, 2008;Ryvkin, 2010;Wasser, 2013aWasser, , 2013bEwerhart, 2014), yet we also suspect that the technical complications necessary would not be rewarded by additional insights.…”

Section: The Contest Stagementioning

confidence: 76%

Voluntary Disclosure in Unfair Contests

Ewerhart¹,

Grrnseis²

2018

SSRN Journal

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This paper studies incentives for the interim voluntary disclosure of ver-i…able information in probabilistic all-pay contests. Considered are unfair contests, i.e., contests in which, subject to activity conditions, one player (the favorite) is interim always more likely to win than the other player (the underdog). A condition is identi…ed that ensures that a given contest is unfair regardless of disclosure decisions. Under this condition, full revelation is the unique perfect Bayesian equilibrium outcome of the contest with pre-play communication. This is so because the weakest type of the underdog will try to moderate the favorite, while the strongest type of the favorite will try to discourage the underdog-so that the contest unravels. We also show that self-disclosure may, with positive probability, provoke unintended reactions, i.e., "dominant"or "de…ant"behavior. Moreover, while individually rational for the marginal type, the unraveling may be strictly Pareto inferior from an ex-ante perspective. Our main conclusion is just the opposite of the corresponding …nding for the deterministic all-pay auction. The proofs employ lattice-theoretic methods and an improved version of Jensen's inequality.

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“…This section constructs a conventional, i.e., fixed-prize, Tullock contest for the sake of comparison with our mechanism (later in Section V). 9 However, we augment the prior art of dealing with conventional contests [21]- [23], from solving the equilibrium to optimizing (as well as solving) the equilibrium, in order to create the most superior benchmark to challenge our mechanism.…”

Section: Optimal Fixed-prize Tullock Contestsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…To find an appropriate benchmark for a new mechanism designed as such to compare against, we need a fixed-prize Tullock contest. However, even this conventional and seemingly simple case turns out to be challenging-a general analytical solution to its equilibria does not exist and only numerical ones are available in the literature [21]- [23]. Furthermore, we go one significant step beyond prior art, by not only solving equilibria of such conventional contests, but also optimizing the contests by finding the "best" equilibrium in terms of the same (utility-maximizing) objective.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Crowdsourcing with Tullock contests: A new perspective

Luo

Kanhere

Tan

et al. 2015

2015 IEEE Conference on Computer Communications (INFOCOM)

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Incentive mechanisms for crowdsourcing have been extensively studied under the framework of all-pay auctions. Along a distinct line, this paper proposes to use Tullock contests as an alternative tool to design incentive mechanisms for crowdsourcing. We are inspired by the conduciveness of Tullock contests to attracting user entry (yet not necessarily a higher revenue) in other domains. In this paper, we explore a new dimension in optimal Tullock contest design, by superseding the contest prize---which is fixed in conventional Tullock contests---with a prize function that is dependent on the (unknown) winner's contribution, in order to maximize the crowdsourcer's utility. We show that this approach leads to attractive practical advantages: (a) it is well-suited for rapid prototyping in fully distributed web agents and smartphone apps; (b) it overcomes the disincentive to participate caused by players' antagonism to an increasing number of rivals. Furthermore, we optimize conventional, fixed-prize Tullock contests to construct the most superior benchmark to compare against our mechanism. Through extensive evaluations, we show that our mechanism significantly outperforms the optimal benchmark, by over three folds on the crowdsourcer's utility cum profit and up to nine folds on the players' social welfare.Comment: 9 pages, 4 figures, 3 table

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Incomplete information in rent-seeking contests

Cited by 70 publications

References 25 publications

Information Sharing in Contests

Information Sharing in Contests

Voluntary Disclosure in Unfair Contests

Crowdsourcing with Tullock contests: A new perspective

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