This paper studies the effects of head starts in innovation contests. We analyze a two- firm winner-takes-all contest in which each firm decides when to stop a privately observed search for innovations (with recall). The firm with a superior innovation at the outset has a head start. The firm...

We study the design of information disclosure in a dynamic multi-agent research contest, where each agent privately searches for innovations and submits his best to compete for a winner-takes-all prize. We find that although submission is a onetime event for each agent, different disclosure...

In an earlier paper published in this journal, Azrieli and Jain (2018) claim that a social choice function (SCF) is symmetrically implementable in a dominant strategy equilibrium only if the SCF is symmetric. This result crucially relies on their notion of dominant strategy, which is used in the...

In multi-round elimination tournaments, players experience "psychological momentum". We re-consider the design of elimination tournament plan, by taking into account of various types of psychological momentum. The results show that if there is negative psychological momentum, either persistent...