The world needs rapid innovation to address the myriad consequences of the COVID-19 pandemic. The sudden onset of the pandemic and its immense human and economic costs suggests that ordinary processes are not enough. The world also needs innovation in innovation generation. Prizes are an...

I develop an empirical model of idea generation contests with heterogeneous participants and endogenous entry, fit the model to data from a platform used by major advertisers, and simulate counterfactual contest designs. The empirical model resolves ambiguous predictions yielded by contest...