We study the optimal design of organizations under the assumption that agents in a contest care about their relative position. A judicious definition of status categories can be used by a principal in order to influence the agents' performance. We first consider a pure status case where there...

We study the optimal design of organizations under the assumption that agents in a contest care about their relative position. A principal determines the number and size of status categories in order to maximize output. We first consider the pure status case without tangible prizes. Our results...

We study all-pay contests under incomplete information where the reward is a function of the contestant's type and also of his effort. We analyze the optimal reward for the designer when the reward is either multiplicatively separable or additively separable in effort and type. In the...