Back to Search
Start Over
Optimal Feedback in Contests
- Source :
- EC
- Publication Year :
- 2022
- Publisher :
- Oxford University Press (OUP), 2022.
-
Abstract
- We obtain optimal dynamic contests for environments where the designer monitors effort through coarse, binary signals—Poisson successes—and aims to elicit maximum effort, ideally in the least amount of time possible, given a fixed prize. The designer has a vast set of contests to choose from, featuring termination and prize-allocation rules together with real-time feedback for the contestants. Every effort-maximizing contest (which also maximizes total expected successes) has a history-dependent termination rule, a feedback policy that keeps agents fully apprised of their own success, and a prize-allocation rule that grants them, in expectation, a time-invariant share of the prize if they succeed. Any contest that achieves this effort in the shortest possible time must in addition be what we call second chance: once a pre-specified number of successes arrive, the contest enters a countdown phase where contestants are given one last chance to succeed.
Details
- ISSN :
- 1467937X and 00346527
- Database :
- OpenAIRE
- Journal :
- The Review of Economic Studies
- Accession number :
- edsair.doi.dedup.....2b62734e6b34d14a1c697dc49d7a17f1