Discrimination in contests: a survey

Mealem, Yosef; Nitzan, Shmuel

doi:10.1007/s10058-016-0186-0

Cited by 27 publications

(29 citation statements)

References 44 publications

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“…The literature on leveling the playing field and the debate around the same have been assessed from economic (Holzer and Neumark, 2000;Fryer Jr and Loury, 2005;Fang and Moro, 2011;Mealem and Nitzan, 2016), legal (Sturm and Guinier, 1996;Hyman et al, 2012;Somani, 2012;Schuck, 2014), psychological (Yang et al, 2006), and institutional (Murrell and Jones, 1996;Sowell, 2004;Kalev, Dobbin, and Kelly, 2006) perspectives, though most surveys in disciplines outside of Economics focus exclusively on AA. Murrell and Jones (1996) report existing statistical and literary findings on the impact of AA on employment, education, and business ownership.…”

Section: Related Surveys and The Scope Of The Present Studymentioning

confidence: 99%

Heterogeneity, Leveling the Playing Field, and Affirmative Action in Contests

2020

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The heterogeneous abilities of the players in various competitive contexts often lead to undesirable outcomes such as low effort provision, lack of diversity, and inequality. A range of policies are implemented to mitigate such issues by enforcing competitive balance, i.e., leveling the playing field. While a number of such policies are aimed at increasing competition, affirmative action (AA) policies are historically practiced in an ethical response to historical discrimination against particular social groups among winners. This survey summarizes the rapidly growing literature of contest theory on AA and other policies that level the playing field. Using a general theoretical structure, we outline research on player and contest designer behavior under a multitude of policy mechanisms; and discuss the theoretical, experimental, and empirical results in relation to some of the common debates surrounding AA.

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Section: Related Surveys and The Scope Of The Present Studymentioning

confidence: 99%

Heterogeneity, Leveling the Playing Field, and Affirmative Action in Contests

2020

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“…Our study contributes to the literature on revenue maximization with biased contest success functions and heterogeneous players, comp. Nti (2004), [33], Fu (2006), [19], Franke (2012), [16], and Epstein et al (2011 and 2013), [11] and [12]; see also Mealem and Nitzan (forthcoming), [31], for a recent survey on discrimination in contest games. 4 Moreover, our study contributes to the recent interest in the analysis of head starts in different competitive situations, comp.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Optimal favoritism in all-pay auctions and lottery contests

Franke

Leininger

Wasser

2018

European Economic Review

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We analyze the revenue-enhancing potential of favoring specific contestants in complete information all-pay auctions and lottery contests with several heterogeneous contestants. Two instruments of favoritism are considered: Head starts that are added to the bids of specific contestants and multiplicative biases that give idiosyncratic weights to the bids. In the all-pay auction, head starts are more effective than biases while optimally combining both instruments even yields first-best revenue. In the lottery contest, head starts are less effective than biases and combining both instruments cannot further increase revenue. As all-pay auctions revenuedominate lottery contests under optimal biases, we thus obtain an unambiguous revenue-ranking of all six combinations of contest formats and instruments. JEL-Codes: C720, D720.

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“…Empirical studies on the discouragement effect of asymmetries are done by Sunde (2009) on tennis tournaments and Brown (2011) and Franke (2012) on golf tournaments. See also surveys by Konrad (2009), Mealem and Nitzan (2016), and Chowdury, et al (2020).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…5). In that literature, focus is on cases where contestants have direct benefits from their skill levels; in the case of 4 Also other instruments have been suggested to increase efforts in asymmetric contests: Che and Gale (1998) discuss putting limits on contestants' efforts; Mealem and Nitzan (2016) discuss affecting the contestants' contest success functions and win valuations; Sisak (2009) discusses changing the prize structure; Nilssen (2020a, 2020b) discuss how to split the prize fund between early and late prizes in order to counter the effect of ex-ante differences among contestants.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Fatter or Fitter? On rewarding and training in a contest

Clark

Nilssen

2020

SBEWPE

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Competition between heterogeneous participants often leads to low effort provision in contests. We consider a principal who can divide her fixed budget between skill-enhancing training and the contest prize. Training can reduce heterogeneity, which increases effort. But it also reduces the contest prize, which makes effort fall. We set up an incomplete-information contest with heterogeneous players and show how this trade-off is related to the size of the budget when the principal maximizes expected effort. A selection problem can also arise in this framework in which there is a cost associated with a contest win by the inferior player. This gives the principal a larger incentive to train the expected laggard, reducing the size of the prize on offer.

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Discrimination in contests: a survey

Cited by 27 publications

References 44 publications

Heterogeneity, Leveling the Playing Field, and Affirmative Action in Contests

Heterogeneity, Leveling the Playing Field, and Affirmative Action in Contests

Optimal favoritism in all-pay auctions and lottery contests

Fatter or Fitter? On rewarding and training in a contest

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