Contest Design with Uncertain Performance and Costly Participation

Levy, Priel; Sarne, David; Rochlin, Igor

doi:10.24963/ijcai.2017/43

Cited by 12 publications

(13 citation statements)

References 18 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Order By: Relevance

“…Very recently, researchers proposed the simple contest [Ghosh and Kleinberg, 2016, Levy et al, 2017, Sarne and Lepioshkin, 2017. The simple contest mechanisms caputure the scenarios where a contributor's output quality is a fixed level if an agent decides to participate the contest, either for she would do her best or for she cannot control the quality.…”

Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

Invitation in Crowdsourcing Contests

Shi¹,

Dong²

2021

Preprint

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

In a crowdsourcing contest, a requester holding a task posts it to a crowd. People in the crowd then compete with each other to win the rewards. Although in real life, a crowd is usually networked and people influence each other via social ties, existing crowdsourcing contest theories do not aim to answer how interpersonal relationships influence peoples' incentives and behaviors, and thereby affect the crowdsourcing performance. In this work, we novelly take peoples' social ties as a key factor in the modeling and designing of agents' incentives for crowdsourcing contests. We then establish a new contest mechanism by which the requester can impel agents to invite their neighbours to contribute to the task. The mechanism has a simple rule and is very easy for agents to play. According to our equilibrium analysis, in the Bayesian Nash equilibrium agents' behaviors show a vast diversity, capturing that besides the intrinsic ability, the social ties among agents also play a central role for decision-making. After that, we design an effective algorithm to automatically compute the Bayesian Nash equilibrium of the invitation crowdsourcing contest and further adapt it to large graphs. Both theoretical and empirical results show that, the invitation crowdsourcing contest can substantially enlarge the number of contributors, whereby the requester can obtain significantly better solutions without a large advertisement expenditure.

show abstract

Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

Invitation in Crowdsourcing Contests

Shi¹,

Dong²

2021

Preprint

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…Most of the literature including the recent one focuses on various aspects in the design of a single contest. For example, [Levy and Sarne, 2018] compare "simple" versus "complicated" contests, showing empirically that there is no advantage for the latter type. [Gao et al, 2012] studies contests where the contestants are partitioned to groups, and showed that small groups are better than large ones.…”

Section: Multiple Competing Contestsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…[Gao et al, 2012] studies contests where the contestants are partitioned to groups, and showed that small groups are better than large ones. [Levy et al, 2017] study how to design a contest which maximizes the quality of the best contributors. A similar approach has been used by [Xu and Larson, 2014] that describe how to self-exclude contestants with low-expertise.…”

Section: Multiple Competing Contestsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Competition Among Contests: a Safety Level Analysis

Lavi

Shiran-Shvarzbard

2020

Proceedings of the Twenty-Ninth International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

We study a competition among two contests, where each contest designer aims to attract as much effort as possible. Such a competition exists in reality, e.g., in crowd-sourcing websites. Our results are phrased in terms of the ``relative prize power'' of a contest, which is the ratio of the total prize offered by this contest designer relative to the sum of total prizes of the two contests. When contestants have a quasi-linear utility function that captures both a risk-aversion effect and a cost of effort, we show that a simple contest attracts a total effort which approaches the relative prize power of the contest designer assuming a large number of contestants. This holds regardless of the contest policy of the opponent, hence providing a ``safety level'' which is a robust notion similar in spirit to the max-min solution concept.

show abstract

“…The underlying contest model used in our experimental design is similar to the one used by our prior work (Levy, Sarne, and Rochlin 2017) and by Ghosh and Kleinberg (2016) and Sarne and Lepioshkin (2017). Formally, the model considers a contest organizer and a set A = {A 1 , ..., A k } of k > 1 potential contestants.…”

Section: The Contest Modelmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…For this purpose, we use a "simple" contest model in which contestants only need to strategize about participating in the contest (Ghosh and Kleinberg 2016;Levy, Sarne, and Rochlin 2017;Sarne and Lepioshkin 2017). This contest model (and in particular the fact that a contestant's strategy is fully captured by her participation decision) offers several inherent advantages that facilitate the studying of whether over-participation in contests derives from the competitive nature of the contest setting or perhaps it is the product of a more general factor that can be found in non-competitive settings.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Understanding Over Participation in Simple Contests

Levy

Sarne

2018

AAAI

Self Cite

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

One key motivation for using contests in real-life is the substantial evidence reported in empirical contest-design literature for people's tendency to act more competitively in contests than predicted by the Nash Equilibrium. This phenomenon has been traditionally explained by people's eagerness to win and maximize their relative (rather than absolute) payoffs. In this paper we make use of "simple contests," where contestants only need to strategize on whether to participate in the contest or not, as an infrastructure for studying whether indeed more effort is exerted in contests due to competitiveness, or perhaps this can be attributed to other factors that hold also in non-competitive settings. The experimental methodology we use compares contestants' participation decisions in eight contest settings differing in the nature of the contest used, the number of contestants used and the theoretical participation predictions to those obtained (whenever applicable) by subjects facing equivalent non-competitive decision situations in the form of a lottery. We show that indeed people tend to over-participate in contests compared to the theoretical predictions, yet the same phenomenon holds (to a similar extent) also in the equivalent non-competitive settings. Meaning that many of the contests used nowadays as a means for inducing extra human effort, that are often complex to organize and manage, can be replaced by a simpler non-competitive mechanism that uses probabilistic prizes.

show abstract

Contest Design with Uncertain Performance and Costly Participation

Cited by 12 publications

References 18 publications

Invitation in Crowdsourcing Contests

Invitation in Crowdsourcing Contests

Competition Among Contests: a Safety Level Analysis

Understanding Over Participation in Simple Contests

Contact Info

Product

Resources

About