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Optimal Contests with Incomplete Information and Convex Effort Costs

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  • Mengxi Zhang

Abstract

I investigate the design of effort-maximizing mechanisms when agents have both private information and convex effort costs, and the designer has a fixed prize budget. I first demonstrate that it is always optimal for the designer to utilize a contest with as many participants as possible. Further, I identify a necessary and sufficient condition for the winner-takes-all prize structure to be optimal. When this condition fails, the designer may prefer to award multiple prizes of descending sizes. I also provide a characterization of the optimal prize allocation rule for this case. Finally, I illustrate how the optimal prize distribution evolves as the contest size grows.

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  • 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.
    • Handle: RePEc:bon:boncrc:crctr224_2023_156v2
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    File URL: https://www.crctr224.de/research/discussion-papers/archive/dp156
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    Cited by:

    1. Deng, Shanglyu & Fu, Qiang & Wu, Zenan & Zhu, Yuxuan, 2024. "Contests with sequential entry and incomplete information," Theoretical Economics, Econometric Society, vol. 19(2), May.

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