The optimal contest architecture for symmetric imperfectly discriminating contests is shown to be generically the two-stage tournament (rather than the one-stage contest). In the first stage the contestants compete in several parallel divisions for the right to participate in the second stage....

Pay-for-performance (P4P) pricing schemes such as pay-per-click and pay-per-action have grown in popularity in Internet advertising. Meanwhile, the traditional pay-per-impression (PPI) scheme persists, and several advertising publishers have started to offer a hybrid mix of PPI and P4P schemes....

We study a game in which two competing sellers supplying experience goods of different quality can induce a perspective buyer into a bad purchase through (costly) deceptive advertising. We characterize the equilibrium set of the game and argue that an important class of these outcomes features...

There are at least two reasons why multiple prizes can be optimal in symmetric imperfectly discriminating contests. First, the introduction of multiple prizes reduces the standard deviation of contestants' effort in asymmetric equilibria, when the majority of contestants actively participate in...