IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/arx/papers/2205.08104.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

Restricting Entries to All-Pay Contests

Author

Listed:
  • Fupeng Sun
  • Yanwei Sun
  • Chiwei Yan
  • Li Jin

Abstract

We study an all-pay contest where players with low abilities are filtered prior to the round of competing for prizes. These are often practiced due to limited resources or to enhance the competitiveness of the contest. We consider a setting where the designer admits a certain number of top players into the contest. The players admitted into the contest update their beliefs about their opponents based on the signal that their abilities are among the top. We find that their posterior beliefs, even with IID priors, are correlated and depend on players' private abilities, representing a unique feature of this game. We explicitly characterize the symmetric and unique Bayesian equilibrium strategy. We find that each admitted player's equilibrium effort is in general not monotone with the number of admitted players. Despite this non-monotonicity, surprisingly, all players exert their highest efforts when all players are admitted. This result holds generally -- it is true under any ranking-based prize structure, ability distribution, and cost function. We also discuss a two-stage extension where players with top first-stage efforts can proceed to the second stage competing for prizes.

Suggested Citation

  • Fupeng Sun & Yanwei Sun & Chiwei Yan & Li Jin, 2022. "Restricting Entries to All-Pay Contests," Papers 2205.08104, arXiv.org, revised Mar 2024.
  • Handle: RePEc:arx:papers:2205.08104
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://arxiv.org/pdf/2205.08104
    File Function: Latest version
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Hou, Ting & Zhang, Wen, 2021. "Optimal two-stage elimination contests for crowdsourcing," Transportation Research Part E: Logistics and Transportation Review, Elsevier, vol. 145(C).
    2. Qiang Fu & Jingfeng Lu, 2012. "The optimal multi-stage contest," Economic Theory, Springer;Society for the Advancement of Economic Theory (SAET), vol. 51(2), pages 351-382, October.
    3. Roger B. Myerson, 1981. "Optimal Auction Design," Mathematics of Operations Research, INFORMS, vol. 6(1), pages 58-73, February.
    4. Chawla, Shuchi & Hartline, Jason D. & Sivan, Balasubramanian, 2019. "Optimal crowdsourcing contests," Games and Economic Behavior, Elsevier, vol. 113(C), pages 80-96.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Most related items

    These are the items that most often cite the same works as this one and are cited by the same works as this one.
    1. Mengxi Zhang, 2023. "Optimal Contests with Incomplete Information and Convex Effort Costs," CRC TR 224 Discussion Paper Series crctr224_2023_156v2, University of Bonn and University of Mannheim, Germany.
    2. Qi Shi & Dong Hao, 2021. "Social Sourcing: Incorporating Social Networks Into Crowdsourcing Contest Design," Papers 2112.02884, arXiv.org, revised Nov 2022.
    3. Alcalde, José & Dahm, Matthias, 2019. "Dual sourcing with price discovery," Games and Economic Behavior, Elsevier, vol. 115(C), pages 225-246.
    4. Zhuoqiong Chen, 2021. "All-pay auctions with private signals about opponents’ values," Review of Economic Design, Springer;Society for Economic Design, vol. 25(1), pages 33-64, June.
    5. Liu, Bin & Lu, Jingfeng, 2023. "Optimal orchestration of rewards and punishments in rank-order contests," Journal of Economic Theory, Elsevier, vol. 208(C).
    6. Carmen Beviá & Luis Corchón, 2022. "Contests with dominant strategies," Economic Theory, Springer;Society for the Advancement of Economic Theory (SAET), vol. 74(4), pages 1-19, November.
    7. Wasser, Cédric & Zhang, Mengxi, 2023. "Differential treatment and the winner's effort in contests with incomplete information," Games and Economic Behavior, Elsevier, vol. 138(C), pages 90-111.
    8. Lian Jian & Zheng Li & Tracy Xiao Liu, 2017. "Simultaneous versus sequential all-pay auctions: an experimental study," Experimental Economics, Springer;Economic Science Association, vol. 20(3), pages 648-669, September.
    9. Konstantinos I. Stouras & Jeremy Hutchison-Krupat & Raul O. Chao, 2022. "The Role of Participation in Innovation Contests," Management Science, INFORMS, vol. 68(6), pages 4135-4150, June.
    10. Jason Milionis & Ciamac C. Moallemi & Tim Roughgarden, 2023. "A Myersonian Framework for Optimal Liquidity Provision in Automated Market Makers," Papers 2303.00208, arXiv.org, revised Nov 2023.
    11. Arve, Malin & Zwart, Gijsbert, 2023. "Optimal procurement and investment in new technologies under uncertainty," Journal of Economic Dynamics and Control, Elsevier, vol. 147(C).
    12. Yuya Wakabayashi & Ryosuke Sakai & Shigehiro Serizawa, 2022. "A Characterization of the Minimum Price Walrasian Rule with Reserve Prices for an Arbitrary Number of Agents and Objects," ISER Discussion Paper 1161, Institute of Social and Economic Research, Osaka University.
    13. Nicolas Gruyer, 2009. "Optimal Auctions When A Seller Is Bound To Sell To Collusive Bidders," Journal of Industrial Economics, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 57(4), pages 835-850, December.
    14. Yeon-Koo Che & Ian Gale, 1994. "Auctions with budget-constrained buyers: a nonequivalence result," Working Papers (Old Series) 9402, Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland.
    15. Scott Fay & Robert Zeithammer, 2017. "Bidding for Bidders? How the Format for Soliciting Supplier Participation in NYOP Auctions Impacts Channel Profit," Management Science, INFORMS, vol. 63(12), pages 4324-4344, December.
    16. Hanming Fang & Peter Norman, 2014. "Toward an efficiency rationale for the public provision of private goods," Economic Theory, Springer;Society for the Advancement of Economic Theory (SAET), vol. 56(2), pages 375-408, June.
    17. Jeremy Bulow & Paul Klemperer, 1994. "Auctions vs. Negotiations," NBER Working Papers 4608, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
    18. Bogetoft, Peter & Nielsen, Kurt, 2003. "Yardstick Based Procurement Design In Natural Resource Management," 2003 Annual Meeting, August 16-22, 2003, Durban, South Africa 25910, International Association of Agricultural Economists.
    19. Shunda, Nicholas, 2009. "Auctions with a buy price: The case of reference-dependent preferences," Games and Economic Behavior, Elsevier, vol. 67(2), pages 645-664, November.
    20. Koessler, Frédéric & Skreta, Vasiliki, 2016. "Informed seller with taste heterogeneity," Journal of Economic Theory, Elsevier, vol. 165(C), pages 456-471.

    More about this item

    NEP fields

    This paper has been announced in the following NEP Reports:

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:arx:papers:2205.08104. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    If CitEc recognized a bibliographic reference but did not link an item in RePEc to it, you can help with this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: arXiv administrators (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://arxiv.org/ .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.