Optimal rewards in contests

The allocation of rewards in athletic contests

Optimal crowdsourcing contests

We study the design and approximation of optimal crowdsourcing contests. Crowdsourcing contests can be modeled as all-pay auctions because entrants must exert effort up-front to enter. Unlike all-pay auctions where a usual design objective would be to maximize revenue, in crowdsourcing contests, the principal only benefits from the submission with the highest quality. We give a theory for optim...

Optimal Design of Crowdsourcing Contests

This paper provides a game theoretic model of a crowdsourcing contest. Special attention is given to the asymptotic behavior of the contest outcome. We show that all significant outcomes of crowdsourcing contests will be determined by contestants in a small neighborhood (core) of the most efficient contestant type; in particular, the asymptotic structure of the crowdsourcing contests is distrib...

Optimal Design of Consumer Contests

A consumer contest is a sales promotion technique that requires participants to apply certain skills as they compete for prizes or awards. This article is the first to employ a game-theoretical approach to investigate consumer contest design issues, including prize structure, segmentation, and handicapping. First, the authors find that both skill distribution and the number of contestants play ...

Optimal Rewards for Economic Regulation

Suppose several production units or firms must be regulated when costs and benefits are uncertain. Pollution might be a specific example, although there are many others. Given that firms must bear their own costs, the regulators want to transmit a schedule of revenues to each unit which in some expected value sense elicits an optimal response. What makes this problem intriguing is that while be...