Optimal Contests with Incomplete Information and Convex Effort Costs

主讲人: 张梦兮（波恩大学助理教授）

主持老师: （经院）吴泽南、石凡奇；（国发院）胡岠

参与老师: （经院）胡涛、吴泽南、石凡奇；（国发院）汪浩、胡岠

题目: Optimal Contests with Incomplete Information and Convex Effort Costs

作者：张梦兮

时间：2021年9月29日（周三）10:30-12:00

地点：经济学院107

报告摘要：

I investigate the optimal design of contests when contestants have both private information and convex effort costs. The designer has a fixed prize budget and her objective is to maximize the expected total effort. I first demonstrate that it is always optimal for the designer to employ a grand static contest with as many participants as possible. Further, I identify a sufficient and necessary condition for the winner-takes-all prize structure to be optimal. When this condition fails, the designer may prefer to award multiple prizes of descending sizes. I also provide a characterization of the optimal prize allocation rule for this case. Lastly, I illustrate how the optimal prize distribution evolves as contest size grows: the prize distribution first becomes more unequal until the optimal level of competition intensity is obtained and then becomes less unequal to maintain the optimal intensity.

主讲人简介：

Mengxi Zhang is an Assistant Professor at Department of Economics, University of Bonn. She is also a member of Hausdorff Center for Mathematics, University of Bonn. She received her PhD in Economics from Boston University. Her primary research interests are in the areas of Applied Microeconomic Theory and Mechanism Design.