Information disclosure in dynamic research contests

Abstract

We study the design of information disclosure in a dynamic multi-agent research contest, where each agent privately searches for innovations and submits his best to compete for a winner-takes-all prize. We .nd that although submission is behavior in a public contest where submissions are immediately revealed and in a hidden contest where no submission information is revealed to the agents. In addition, for contests with inde.nite duration, the public disclosure policy is an optimal policy among a natural set of disclosure policies.