Recent decades have witnessed the thriving of platform economics. More small-and-medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) are selling products via these E-platforms, e.g., Amazon and Alibaba. These SMEs are usually short of funds and the E-platforms can step up to offer financing services due to...

We study contests in which contestants are homogeneous and have convex effort costs. Increasing contest competitiveness, by making prizes more unequal, scaling up the competition, or adding new contestants, always discourages effort. These results have significant implications: although often...

Uncompetitive contests for grades, promotions, retention, and job assignments, which feature lax standards and limited candidate pools, are often criticized for being unmeritocratic. We show that, when contestants are strategic, lax standards and exclusivity can make selection more meritocratic....