Many sales, sports, and research contests are put in place to maximize contestants’ performance. We investigate and provide a complete characterization of the prize structures that achieve this objective in settings with many contestants. The contestants may be ex-ante asymmetric in their...

We study optimal incentive contracts with multiple agents when performance is evaluated by a reviewer. The reviewer may be biased in favor of the agents, but the degree of bias is unknown to the principal. We show that a contest, which is a contract in which the principal fixes a set of prizes...

We investigate a common-value labor setting in which firms interview a worker prior to hiring. When firms have private information about the worker’s value and interview decisions are kept private, many firms may enter the market, interview, and hire with positive probability. When firms’...

This paper examines the interplay between career concerns and market structure. Ability and effort are complements: effort increases the probability that a skilled agent achieves a one-time breakthrough. Wages are based on assessed ability and on expected output. Effort levels at different times...

This paper explores the optimal design of biased contests. A designer imposes an identity-dependent treatment on contestants, which varies the balance of the playing field. A generalized lottery contest typically yields no closed-form equilibrium solutions, which nullifies the usual implicit...

We consider deterministic dominant strategy implementation in multidimensional dichotomous domains in private values and quasi-linear utility setting. In such multidimensional domains, an agent’s type is characterized by a single number, the value of the agent, and a non-empty set of...

We study the design of mechanisms that implement Lindahl or Walrasian allocations and whose Nash equilibria are dynamically stable for a wide class of adaptive dynamics. We argue that supermodularity is not a desirable stability criterion in this mechanism design context, focusing instead on...

We generalize the canonical problem of Nash implementation by allowing agents to voluntarily provide discriminatory signals, i.e. evidence. Evidence can either take the form of hard information or, more generally, have differential but non-prohibitive costs in different states. In such...