Optimal contest design for simple agents

Abstract

We study the optimal design of contests for 'simple' agents, where potential contestants strategically reason about whether or not to participate in the contest, but do not strategize about the quality of their submissions. Consider a population of n agents, where an agent with type (qi, ci chooses between participating and producing a submission of quality qi at cost ci, versus not participating at all, to maximize her utility. How should a principal distribute a total prize V amongst the n ranks to maximize some increasing function of the qualities of elicited submissions in a contest with such simple agents'

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