IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/wly/canjec/v49y2016i1p52-75.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

Disclosure policy in Tullock contests with asymmetric stochastic entry

Author

Listed:
  • Qiang Fu
  • Jingfeng Lu
  • Jun Zhang

Abstract

We examine how disclosure policy can be optimally designed to incentivize contestants when their participation is exogenously stochastic. In a generalized Tullock contest setting with two players who are asymmetric in both their values and entry probabilities, we fully characterize the necessary and sufficient conditions under which no disclosure dominates full disclosure. We find that the comparison depends solely on a balance effect exercised by entry probabilities on the expected total effort. The optimal disclosure policy must better balance the competition. These conditions continue to hold when the precision r of Tullock contests is endogenously chosen by the designer. Politique de divulgation dans des concours à la Tullock quand l'entrée est stochastique et asymétrique. On examine comment une politique de divulgation ou non du nombre des participants à un concours peut être optimisée pour donner des incitations aux participants quand leur participation est le résultat d'aléas exogènes. Dans le contexte généralisé d'un concours à la Tullock avec deux joueurs qui sont asymétriques tant dans leurs valeurs que dans leurs probabilités d'entrée, on définit les conditions nécessaires et suffisantes pour lesquelles la non divulgation est préférable à la pleine divulgation. On découvre que la comparaison dépend seulement de l'effet de balance exercé par les probabilités d'entrée sur l'effort total anticipé. La politique optimale de divulgation doit balancer au mieux la concurrence. Ces conditions sont maintenues quand la précision r des concours à la Tullock est choisie de manière endogène par le designer du concours.

Suggested Citation

  • Qiang Fu & Jingfeng Lu & Jun Zhang, 2016. "Disclosure policy in Tullock contests with asymmetric stochastic entry," Canadian Journal of Economics/Revue canadienne d'économique, John Wiley & Sons, vol. 49(1), pages 52-75, February.
  • Handle: RePEc:wly:canjec:v:49:y:2016:i:1:p:52-75
    DOI: 10.1111/caje.12190
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://doi.org/10.1111/caje.12190
    Download Restriction: no

    File URL: https://libkey.io/10.1111/caje.12190?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
    ---><---

    Other versions of this item:

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Konrad, Kai A., 2009. "Strategy and Dynamics in Contests," OUP Catalogue, Oxford University Press, number 9780199549603.
    2. J. Atsu Amegashie, 2009. "American Idol: should it be a singing contest or a popularity contest?," Journal of Cultural Economics, Springer;The Association for Cultural Economics International, vol. 33(4), pages 265-277, November.
    3. Qiang Fu & Qian Jiao & Jingfeng Lu, 2011. "On disclosure policy in contests with stochastic entry," Public Choice, Springer, vol. 148(3), pages 419-434, September.
    4. Roger Myerson & Karl Wärneryd, 2006. "Population uncertainty in contests," Economic Theory, Springer;Society for the Advancement of Economic Theory (SAET), vol. 27(2), pages 469-474, January.
    5. Matthews, Steven, 1987. "Comparing Auctions for Risk Averse Buyers: A Buyer's Point of View," Econometrica, Econometric Society, vol. 55(3), pages 633-646, May.
    6. Che, Yeon-Koo & Gale, Ian, 1997. "Rent Dissipation When Rent Seekers Are Budget Constrained," Public Choice, Springer, vol. 92(1-2), pages 109-126, July.
    7. McAfee, R. Preston & McMillan, John, 1987. "Auctions with a stochastic number of bidders," Journal of Economic Theory, Elsevier, vol. 43(1), pages 1-19, October.
    8. Lim, Wooyoung & Matros, Alexander, 2009. "Contests with a stochastic number of players," Games and Economic Behavior, Elsevier, vol. 67(2), pages 584-597, November.
    9. Alex Gershkov & Jianpei Li & Paul Schweinzer, 2009. "Efficient tournaments within teams," RAND Journal of Economics, RAND Corporation, vol. 40(1), pages 103-119, March.
    10. Qiang Fu, 2006. "A Theory of Affirmative Action in College Admissions," Economic Inquiry, Western Economic Association International, vol. 44(3), pages 420-428, July.
    11. Alcalde, José & Dahm, Matthias, 2010. "Rent seeking and rent dissipation: A neutrality result," Journal of Public Economics, Elsevier, vol. 94(1-2), pages 1-7, February.
    12. Nti, Kofi O., 2004. "Maximum efforts in contests with asymmetric valuations," European Journal of Political Economy, Elsevier, vol. 20(4), pages 1059-1066, November.
    13. Wang Zhewei, 2010. "The Optimal Accuracy Level in Asymmetric Contests," The B.E. Journal of Theoretical Economics, De Gruyter, vol. 10(1), pages 1-18, April.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Alejandro Melo Ponce, 2018. "The Secret Behind The Tortoise and the Hare: Information Design in Contests," 2018 Papers pme809, Job Market Papers.
    2. Clark, Derek J. & Kundu, Tapas, 2021. "Competitive balance: Information disclosure and discrimination in an asymmetric contest," Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization, Elsevier, vol. 184(C), pages 178-198.
    3. Chen, Bo & Jiang, Xiandeng & Knyazev, Dmitriy, 2017. "On disclosure policies in all-pay auctions with stochastic entry," Journal of Mathematical Economics, Elsevier, vol. 70(C), pages 66-73.
    4. Luke Boosey & Philip Brookins & Dmitry Ryvkin, 2020. "Entry in group contests," Working Papers wp2020_02_01, Department of Economics, Florida State University.
    5. Goel, Sumit & Goyal, Amit, 2023. "Optimal tie-breaking rules," Journal of Mathematical Economics, Elsevier, vol. 108(C).
    6. Drugov, Mikhail & Ryvkin, Dmitry, 2017. "Winner-Take-All Tournaments," CEPR Discussion Papers 12067, C.E.P.R. Discussion Papers.
    7. Bo Chen & Marco Serena, 2020. "Bid Caps and Disclosure Policies," Working Papers tax-mpg-rps-2020-08, Max Planck Institute for Tax Law and Public Finance.
    8. Chen, Bo & Ma, Lijun & Zhu, Zhaobo & Zhou, Yu, 2020. "Disclosure policies in all-pay auctions with bid caps and stochastic entry," Economics Letters, Elsevier, vol. 186(C).
    9. Chen, Bo, 2020. "Disclosure policies in research contests with stochastic entry," Economics Letters, Elsevier, vol. 191(C).
    10. Chen, Zhuoqiong, 2021. "Optimal information exchange in contests," Journal of Mathematical Economics, Elsevier, vol. 96(C).
    11. Feng, Xin & Lu, Jingfeng, 2017. "Uniqueness of equilibrium in two-player asymmetric Tullock contests with intermediate discriminatory power," Economics Letters, Elsevier, vol. 159(C), pages 61-64.
    12. Dmitry Ryvkin & Mikhail Drugov, 2017. "Tournaments," Working Papers wp2017_03_02, Department of Economics, Florida State University.
    13. Chen, Bo & Serena, Marco, 2023. "Disclosure Policies in All-Pay Auctions with Bid Caps," Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization, Elsevier, vol. 209(C), pages 141-160.
    14. Christian Ewerhart & Julia Lareida, 2018. "Voluntary disclosure in asymmetric contests," ECON - Working Papers 279, Department of Economics - University of Zurich, revised Jul 2023.
    15. Jiao, Qian & Ke, Changxia & Liu, Yang, 2022. "When to disclose the number of contestants: Theory and experimental evidence," Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization, Elsevier, vol. 193(C), pages 146-160.
    16. Bo Chen & Emilios Galariotis & Lijun Ma & Zijia Wang & Zhaobo Zhu, 2023. "On disclosure of participation in innovation contests: a dominance result," Annals of Operations Research, Springer, vol. 328(2), pages 1615-1629, September.

    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. Qiang Fu & Qian Jiao & Jingfeng Lu, 2015. "Contests with endogenous entry," International Journal of Game Theory, Springer;Game Theory Society, vol. 44(2), pages 387-424, May.
    2. Boosey, Luke & Brookins, Philip & Ryvkin, Dmitry, 2017. "Contests with group size uncertainty: Experimental evidence," Games and Economic Behavior, Elsevier, vol. 105(C), pages 212-229.
    3. Subhasish M. Chowdhury & Patricia Esteve‐González & Anwesha Mukherjee, 2023. "Heterogeneity, leveling the playing field, and affirmative action in contests," Southern Economic Journal, John Wiley & Sons, vol. 89(3), pages 924-974, January.
    4. Jingfeng Lu & Hongkun Ma & Zhe Wang, 2018. "Ranking Disclosure Policies In All‐Pay Auctions," Economic Inquiry, Western Economic Association International, vol. 56(3), pages 1464-1485, July.
    5. Martin Grossmann, 2021. "Entry regulations and optimal prize allocation in parallel contests," Review of Economic Design, Springer;Society for Economic Design, vol. 25(4), pages 289-316, December.
    6. Feng, Xin, 2020. "Information disclosure on the contest mechanism," Journal of Mathematical Economics, Elsevier, vol. 91(C), pages 148-156.
    7. Gil S. Epstein & Yosef Mealem & Shmuel Nitzan, 2013. "Lotteries vs. All-Pay Auctions in Fair and Biased Contests," Economics and Politics, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 25(1), pages 48-60, March.
    8. Franke, Jörg & Leininger, Wolfgang & Wasser, Cédric, 2018. "Optimal favoritism in all-pay auctions and lottery contests," European Economic Review, Elsevier, vol. 104(C), pages 22-37.
    9. Hoffmann, Magnus & Rota-Graziosi, Grégoire, 2012. "Endogenous timing in general rent-seeking and conflict models," Games and Economic Behavior, Elsevier, vol. 75(1), pages 168-184.
    10. Mustafa Yildirim, 2015. "Accuracy in contests: players’ perspective," Review of Economic Design, Springer;Society for Economic Design, vol. 19(1), pages 67-90, March.
    11. Ewerhart, Christian, 2017. "Revenue ranking of optimally biased contests: The case of two players," Economics Letters, Elsevier, vol. 157(C), pages 167-170.
    12. Jiao, Qian & Shen, Bo & Sun, Xiang, 2019. "Bipartite conflict networks with returns to scale technology," Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization, Elsevier, vol. 163(C), pages 516-531.
    13. Chen, Bo, 2020. "Disclosure policies in research contests with stochastic entry," Economics Letters, Elsevier, vol. 191(C).
    14. Christian Ewerhart & Julia Lareida, 2018. "Voluntary disclosure in asymmetric contests," ECON - Working Papers 279, Department of Economics - University of Zurich, revised Jul 2023.
    15. Dmitry Ryvkin & Mikhail Drugov, 2017. "Tournaments," Working Papers wp2017_03_02, Department of Economics, Florida State University.
    16. Barbieri, Stefano & Serena, Marco, 2022. "Biasing dynamic contests between ex-ante symmetric players," Games and Economic Behavior, Elsevier, vol. 136(C), pages 1-30.
    17. Hoffmann, Magnus & Rota-Graziosi, Grégoire, 2012. "Endogenous timing in general rent-seeking and conflict models," Games and Economic Behavior, Elsevier, vol. 75(1), pages 168-184.
    18. Luke Boosey & Philip Brookins & Dmitry Ryvkin, 2020. "Information Disclosure in Contests with Endogenous Entry: An Experiment," Management Science, INFORMS, vol. 66(11), pages 5128-5150, November.
    19. Ratul Lahkar & Rezina Sultana, 2020. "Affirmative Action in Large Population Contests," Working Papers 40, Ashoka University, Department of Economics.
    20. Chen, Bo & Ma, Lijun & Zhu, Zhaobo & Zhou, Yu, 2020. "Disclosure policies in all-pay auctions with bid caps and stochastic entry," Economics Letters, Elsevier, vol. 186(C).

    More about this item

    JEL classification:

    • C72 - Mathematical and Quantitative Methods - - Game Theory and Bargaining Theory - - - Noncooperative Games

    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:wly:canjec:v:49:y:2016:i:1:p:52-75. 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: Wiley Content Delivery (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://doi.org/10.1111/(ISSN)1540-5982 .

    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.