This paper considers the optimal design of dynamic research contests when the buyer can set time-dependent prizes. We derive the buyer-optimal contest and show that it entails an increasing prize schedule. Remarkably, this allows the buyer to implement a global stopping rule. In particular, the...

In a crowdsourcing contest, innovation is outsourced by a firm to an open crowd that competes in generating innovative solutions. Given that the projects typically consist of multiple attributes, how should the firm optimally design a crowdsourcing contest for such a project? We consider two...

This paper studies an economic contest with identical prizes. We consider the effects of division of the contest. When the contest designer divides the contest symmetrically, each participant competes in each assigned division. The main result is that division is sometimes profitable for the...

In many markets, sellers advertise their good with an asking price. This is a price at which the seller is willing to take his good off the market and trade immediately, though it is understood that a buyer can submit an offer below the asking price and that this offer may be accepted if the...

This note studies contests in which multiple participants compete for two distinct prizes. The participants have distinct constant marginal costs, which are commonly known. We show that the contests have a unique Nash equilibrium, and we characterize the equilibrium payoffs and strategies in...

In this paper we deal with situations of collective contests between two groups over a private prize. A well known way to divide the prize within the winning group is the prize sharing rule introduced by Nitzan, 1991. Since its introduction it has become a standard in the collective contests...

We consider multi-stage elimination contests, where agents efforts at different stages generate some output for the organizers. Depending on the output function we characterize the optimal prize structure of the tournament and show that it is almost efficient. We have found that in some cases...

We propose a novel tournament design that incorporates the main properties of a round-robin tournament, a Swiss tournament, and a race. Following an equilibrium analysis, we compare 36 tournament structures inherent in our model and several well-known tournament models from the literature, on...

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...

Many economic and political decisions are the outcome of strategic contests for a given prize. The nature of such contests can be determined by a designer who is driven by political considerations with a specific political culture. The main objective of this study is to analyze the effect of...