Contests for Status
نویسندگان
چکیده
We study the optimal design of organizations under the assumption that agents in a contest care about their relative position. A judicious de nition of status categories can be used by a principal in order to inuence the agentsperformance. We rst consider a pure status case where there are no tangible prizes. Our main results connect the optimal partition in status categories to properties of the distribution of ability among contestants. The top status category always contains an unique element. For distributions of abilities that have an increasing failure rate (IFR), a proliferation of status classes is optimal, while the optimal partition involves some coarseness in other cases. Moreover, for IFR distributions, a coarse partition with only two status categories achieves at least half of the output obtained in the optimal partition with a proliferation of classes. Finally, we modify the model to allow for status categories that are endogenously determined by monetary prizes of di¤erent sizes. If status is solely derived from monetary rewards, we show that the optimal partition in status classes contains only two categories. We wish to thank Pradeep Dubey, John Geanakoplos, Rongzhu Ke, Hans Haller, Heidrun Hoppe, Dana Moldovanu, Stephen Morris and Moshe Shaked for helpful remarks. Moldovanu is grateful to the Max Planck Research Prize and to the German Science Foundation for nancial support, and to Yale University for its hospitality. Shi thanks the Cowles Foundation for nancial support. Moldovanu: Department of Economics, University of Bonn, Lennestr. 37, 53113 Bonn, Germany; e-mail: [email protected]. Sela: Department of Economics, Ben Gurion University, Beer Sheva, Israel; e-mail: [email protected]. Shi: Department of Economics, Yale University, New Haven, CT 06511, USA; e-mail: [email protected].
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تاریخ انتشار 2005