The Design of Rent-Seeking Competitions: Committees, Preliminary, and Final Contests: Corrigendum

Abstract

My attention has been drawn to an error in Amegashie (1999). To save space, I will only reproduce the relevant equations and ask the reader to refer to the original article.

Effort Maximization in Asymmetric N-Person Contest Games

“…Theorem 2.2 characterizes the equilibrium based on an implicit description of the set K of active players in (1). It should be noted that also the expression for the unique solution x * of the Nash equilibrium problem is implicit because it depends on the set K of active players.…”

“…If the objective of the contest designer is effort maximization, as suggested by the mentioned examples, then the optimal design of the contest becomes crucial, see for instance, Gradstein and Konrad [8] for the optimal number of stages in multistage contests, Amegashie [1] for the optimal seeding of contestants, and Dasgupta and Nti [6] for the optimal contest rule. This literature is based on the assumption that contestants are homogeneous, or that there are only two contestants.…”

Performance and prize decomposition in contests

“…Note that there are several ways of decomposing contests, and we only consider one of them. Amegashie (1999) and Gradstein and Konrad (1999) show that, depending on the return parameter in Tullock function, a series of small sequential elimination contests leads to higher aggregate efforts than a grand contest. Konrad (2007) in his survey shows that splitting contests might dominate a grand contest.…”

“…The design of contests may focus on the number of contestants and their characteristics (ability, preferences, income) (Amegashie 1999;Baye et al 1993), the nature of prizes (private or public goods) (Nitzan 1994b), the multi-stage sequential nature of the contest (Gradstein and Konrad 1999) or the contest success function Nitzan 2006a, 2007;Fang 2002). In this paper we focus on contest design that takes the form of additive contest decomposition; namely the decomposition of a contest into similar subcontests, such that, for every contestant, the sum of the possibly differently valued prizes in the segmented contests is equal to the value of the prize in the original grand contest.…”

Experimental comparison of two multiple-stage contest designs with asymmetric players

“…However, as noted by, among others, Amegashie (1999); Amegashie et al (2007); Blavatskyy (2004), and Stein andRapoport (2004, 2005), contests are often designed as multi-rather than single-stage competitions. In the preliminary stages contestants are grouped into independent cohorts where they compete with one another for the right to participate in the next stage.…”