Contests with dominant strategies Articles uri icon

publication date

  • January 2022

start page

  • 1

end page

  • 19

issue

  • 4

volume

  • 74

International Standard Serial Number (ISSN)

  • 0938-2259

Electronic International Standard Serial Number (EISSN)

  • 1432-0479

abstract

  • In this paper, we first characterize the class of contest success functions (CSFs) that yield contests with equilibria in dominant strategies. Then we study the optimal contest as a decision problem under uncertainty. We consider the classical criteria of Wald, Laplace, Hurwicz and Savage. We find that the CSF that maximizes aggregate effort under these criteria has the form of an additively separable cutoff CSF.

subjects

  • Economics

keywords

  • additively separable csf; contests; dominant strategies; optimality under uncertainty