IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/eee/eecrev/v173y2025ics001429212500011x.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

Status classification by lottery contests

Author

Listed:
  • Sela, Aner

Abstract

We study the optimal design of status classifications in organizational structures under the assumption that agents in a lottery (Tullock) contest care about their relative position. For each such a contest with any number of status categories that is smaller than or equal to the number of agents, we provide sufficient conditions for the optimal partition, which is the distribution of agents among the status categories that maximizes the agents’ symmetric equilibrium effort. We show that, for any number of status categories, in the optimal partition of status categories, the higher the status category, the more agents are included in it. However, in the optimal partition of status categories, a higher status category may not contain more agents than a lower status category when agents receive monetary rewards in addition to the payoff from their relative position (status).

Suggested Citation

  • Sela, Aner, 2025. "Status classification by lottery contests," European Economic Review, Elsevier, vol. 173(C).
    • Handle: RePEc:eee:eecrev:v:173:y:2025:i:c:s001429212500011x
    DOI: 10.1016/j.euroecorev.2025.104961
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S001429212500011X
    Download Restriction: Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only
    File URL: https://libkey.io/10.1016/j.euroecorev.2025.104961?utm_source=ideas
    LibKey link: if access is restricted and if your library uses this service, LibKey will redirect you to where you can use your library subscription to access this item
    ---><---

    As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to search for a different version of it.

    More about this item

    Keywords

    Lottery contests; Status categories;

    JEL classification:

    • D44 - Microeconomics - - Market Structure, Pricing, and Design - - - Auctions
    • J31 - Labor and Demographic Economics - - Wages, Compensation, and Labor Costs - - - Wage Level and Structure; Wage Differentials
    • D72 - Microeconomics - - Analysis of Collective Decision-Making - - - Political Processes: Rent-seeking, Lobbying, Elections, Legislatures, and Voting Behavior
    • D82 - Microeconomics - - Information, Knowledge, and Uncertainty - - - Asymmetric and Private Information; Mechanism Design

    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:eee:eecrev:v:173:y:2025:i:c:s001429212500011x. 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.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using 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: Catherine Liu (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://www.elsevier.com/locate/eer .

    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.