Large Contests

Abstract

We consider contests with many, possibly heterogeneous, players and prizes, and show that the equilibrium outcomes of such contests are approximated by the outcomes of mechanisms that implement the assortative allocation in an environment with a single agent that has a continuum of possible types. This makes it possible to easily approximate the equilibria of contests whose exact equilibrium characterization is complicated, as well as the equilibria of contests for which there is no existing equilibrium characterization.

The Multiplier Effect in Two-Sided Markets with Bilateral Investments

“…Lemma 2 implies r(n, n) = (n−1) 2 (n+1) 2 , so that we immediately obtain the exact strength of the multiplier effect in all balanced markets. 20 For n > k, we obtain that r(n, k)…”

Contest Architecture with Public Disclosures

“…3 The paper contributes to both the contest design and the information design literatures. Earlier papers on contest design have focused on contests with private information and have studied how to arrange contests into subcontests and which prizes to offer to maximize either total effort or highest effort (Glazer and Hassin, 1988;Taylor, 1995;Che and Gale, 2003;Moldovanu andSela, 2001, 2006;Olszewski and Siegel, 2016;Bimpikis et al, 2019). In this paper, I study contest design with full information.…”

War and conflict in economics: Theories, applications, and recent trends

“…We also see extensions of conflict models that enrich the conflict environment to consider variations in the timing of decisions, the information available to contestants, and the heterogeneity of contestants (e.g., Fu et al, 2015;Olszewski and Siegel, 2016). Similarly, analyses of conflict have been expanded to consider interactions between different kinds of contestants, for instance conflicts between state and non-state actors (de Mesquita, 2013;Powell, 2013;Fearon, 2011;Esteban et al, 2015) or between ethnic groups (Esteban and Ray, 2011;Esteban et al, 2012;Mitra and Ray, 2014), and a number of papers consider the influence of third-parties on conflict frequency and outcomes (Baliga and Sjöström, 2012;Hörner et al, 2015;Dekel and Wolinsky, 2012).…”

“…By studying seven specifications of information and timing in all-pay and Tullock contests, they derive a number of "neutrality" conditions that eliminate the discouragement effect, in particular it vanishes when players are not repeatedly matched against the same individual. Olszewski and Siegel (2016) study large contests between players, whose degree of heterogeneity is generalized to being drawn from different distributions. Such a context creates difficulty in computing equilibrium outcomes, but they theoretically establish that these outcomes can be approximated instead by modeling a single individual with a continuum of possible types who matches assortatively to prizes.…”