IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/arx/papers/2006.14860.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

Social Welfare in Search Games with Asymmetric Information

Author

Listed:
  • Gilad Bavly
  • Yuval Heller
  • Amnon Schreiber

Abstract

We consider games in which players search for a hidden prize, and they have asymmetric information about the prize location. We study the social payoff in equilibria of these games. We present sufficient conditions for the existence of an equilibrium that yields the first-best payoff (i.e., the highest social payoff under any strategy profile), and we characterize the first-best payoff. The results have interesting implications for innovation contests and R&D races.

Suggested Citation

  • Gilad Bavly & Yuval Heller & Amnon Schreiber, 2020. "Social Welfare in Search Games with Asymmetric Information," Papers 2006.14860, arXiv.org, revised Apr 2022.
    • Handle: RePEc:arx:papers:2006.14860
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://arxiv.org/pdf/2006.14860
    File Function: Latest version
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    Other versions of this item:

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Matros, Alexander & Smirnov, Vladimir, 2016. "Duplicative search," Games and Economic Behavior, Elsevier, vol. 99(C), pages 1-22.
    2. Tierney, Ryan, 2019. "The problem of multiple commons: A market design approach," Games and Economic Behavior, Elsevier, vol. 114(C), pages 1-27.
    3. Igor Letina & Armin Schmutzler, 2019. "Inducing Variety: A Theory Of Innovation Contests," International Economic Review, Department of Economics, University of Pennsylvania and Osaka University Institute of Social and Economic Research Association, vol. 60(4), pages 1757-1780, November.
    4. Yeon-Koo Che & Ian Gale, 2003. "Optimal Design of Research Contests," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 93(3), pages 646-671, June.
    5. Sanjiv Erat & Vish Krishnan, 2012. "Managing Delegated Search Over Design Spaces," Management Science, INFORMS, vol. 58(3), pages 606-623, March.
    6. Blonski, Matthias, 2005. "The women of Cairo: Equilibria in large anonymous games," Journal of Mathematical Economics, Elsevier, vol. 41(3), pages 253-264, April.
    7. Igor Letina, 2016. "The road not taken: competition and the R&D portfolio," RAND Journal of Economics, RAND Corporation, vol. 47(2), pages 433-460, May.
    8. Christoph H. Loch & Christian Terwiesch & Stefan Thomke, 2001. "Parallel and Sequential Testing of Design Alternatives," Management Science, INFORMS, vol. 47(5), pages 663-678, May.
    9. Fershtman, Chaim & Rubinstein, Ariel, 1997. "A Simple Model of Equilibrium in Search Procedures," Journal of Economic Theory, Elsevier, vol. 72(2), pages 432-441, February.
    10. Kaylan Chatterjee & Robert Evans, 2004. "Rivals' Search for Buried Treasure: Competition and Duplication in R&D," RAND Journal of Economics, The RAND Corporation, vol. 35(1), pages 160-183, Spring.
    11. Jürgen Mihm & Jochen Schlapp, 2019. "Sourcing Innovation: On Feedback in Contests," Management Science, INFORMS, vol. 65(2), pages 559-576, February.
    12. Bryan, Kevin A. & Lemus, Jorge, 2017. "The direction of innovation," Journal of Economic Theory, Elsevier, vol. 172(C), pages 247-272.
    13. Koh, Youngwoo, 2017. "Incentive and sampling effects in procurement auctions with endogenous number of bidders," International Journal of Industrial Organization, Elsevier, vol. 52(C), pages 393-426.
    14. Milchtaich, Igal, 1996. "Congestion Games with Player-Specific Payoff Functions," Games and Economic Behavior, Elsevier, vol. 13(1), pages 111-124, March.
    15. Konrad, Kai A., 2014. "Search duplication in research and design spaces — Exploring the role of local competition," International Journal of Industrial Organization, Elsevier, vol. 37(C), pages 222-228.
    16. Eric Budish & Yeon-Koo Che & Fuhito Kojima & Paul Milgrom, 2013. "Designing Random Allocation Mechanisms: Theory and Applications," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 103(2), pages 585-623, April.
    17. Richard L. Fullerton & R. Preston McAfee, 1999. "Auctioning Entry into Tournaments," Journal of Political Economy, University of Chicago Press, vol. 107(3), pages 573-605, June.
    18. de Roos, Nicolas & Matros, Alexander & Smirnov, Vladimir & Wait, Andrew, 2018. "Shipwrecks and treasure hunters," Journal of Economic Dynamics and Control, Elsevier, vol. 90(C), pages 259-283.
    19. Glenn C. Loury, 1979. "Market Structure and Innovation," The Quarterly Journal of Economics, President and Fellows of Harvard College, vol. 93(3), pages 395-410.
    20. Taylor, Curtis R, 1995. "Digging for Golden Carrots: An Analysis of Research Tournaments," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 85(4), pages 872-890, September.
    21. Ben-Zwi, Oren, 2017. "Walrasian's characterization and a universal ascending auction," Games and Economic Behavior, Elsevier, vol. 104(C), pages 456-467.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Matros, Alexander & Ponomareva, Natalia & Smirnov, Vladimir & Wait, Andrew, 2022. "Search without looking," Journal of Economic Dynamics and Control, Elsevier, vol. 139(C).
    2. Igor Letina & Armin Schmutzler & Regina Seibel, 2020. "Killer acquisitions and beyond: policy effects on innovation strategies," ECON - Working Papers 358, Department of Economics - University of Zurich, revised Jul 2023.
    3. Letina, Igor & Brunner, Philipp & Schmutzler, Armin, 2022. "Research Joint Ventures: The Role of Financial Constraints," CEPR Discussion Papers 17467, C.E.P.R. Discussion Papers.

    Most related items

    These are the items that most often cite the same works as this one and are cited by the same works as this one.
    1. de Roos, Nicolas & Matros, Alexander & Smirnov, Vladimir & Wait, Andrew, 2018. "Shipwrecks and treasure hunters," Journal of Economic Dynamics and Control, Elsevier, vol. 90(C), pages 259-283.
    2. Matros, Alexander & Smirnov, Vladimir, 2016. "Duplicative search," Games and Economic Behavior, Elsevier, vol. 99(C), pages 1-22.
    3. Matros, Alexander & Ponomareva, Natalia & Smirnov, Vladimir & Wait, Andrew, 2022. "Search without looking," Journal of Economic Dynamics and Control, Elsevier, vol. 139(C).
    4. Matros, Alexander & Smirnov, Vladimir, 2011. "Treasure game," Working Papers 2011-10, University of Sydney, School of Economics, revised May 2014.
    5. Konrad, Kai A., 2014. "Search duplication in research and design spaces — Exploring the role of local competition," International Journal of Industrial Organization, Elsevier, vol. 37(C), pages 222-228.
    6. Matros, Alexander & Ponomareva, Natalia & Smirnov, Vladimir & Wait, Andrew, 2019. "Search without observability," Working Papers 2019-04, University of Sydney, School of Economics.
    7. Pavel Kireyev, 2016. "Markets for Ideas: Prize Structure, Entry Limits, and the Design of Ideation Contests," Harvard Business School Working Papers 16-129, Harvard Business School.
    8. Christian Terwiesch & Yi Xu, 2008. "Innovation Contests, Open Innovation, and Multiagent Problem Solving," Management Science, INFORMS, vol. 54(9), pages 1529-1543, September.
    9. Letina, Igor & Schmutzler, Armin & Seibel, Regina, 2020. "Killer Acquisitions and Beyond: Policy Effects on Innovation Strategies," CEPR Discussion Papers 15167, C.E.P.R. Discussion Papers.
    10. Anja Schöttner, 2008. "Fixed-prize tournaments versus first-price auctions in innovation contests," Economic Theory, Springer;Society for the Advancement of Economic Theory (SAET), vol. 35(1), pages 57-71, April.
    11. Laurence Ales & Soo‐Haeng Cho & Ersin Körpeoğlu, 2021. "Innovation Tournaments with Multiple Contributors," Production and Operations Management, Production and Operations Management Society, vol. 30(6), pages 1772-1784, June.
    12. Chiappinelli, Olga & Giuffrida, Leonardo M. & Spagnolo, Giancarlo, 2023. "Public procurement as an innovation policy: Where do we stand?," ZEW Discussion Papers 23-002, ZEW - Leibniz Centre for European Economic Research.
    13. Xu Tian & Gongbing Bi, 2022. "Multiplicative output form and its applications to problems in the homogenous innovation contest model," OR Spectrum: Quantitative Approaches in Management, Springer;Gesellschaft für Operations Research e.V., vol. 44(3), pages 709-732, September.
    14. Yildirim, Huseyin, 2005. "Contests with multiple rounds," Games and Economic Behavior, Elsevier, vol. 51(1), pages 213-227, April.
    15. Konstantinos I. Stouras & Jeremy Hutchison-Krupat & Raul O. Chao, 2022. "The Role of Participation in Innovation Contests," Management Science, INFORMS, vol. 68(6), pages 4135-4150, June.
    16. Jonas Send, 2021. "Contest Copycats: Adversarial Duplication of Effort in Contests," Working Papers tax-mpg-rps-2021-17, Max Planck Institute for Tax Law and Public Finance.
    17. Koh, Youngwoo, 2017. "Incentive and sampling effects in procurement auctions with endogenous number of bidders," International Journal of Industrial Organization, Elsevier, vol. 52(C), pages 393-426.
    18. C. Gizem Korpeoglu & Ersin Körpeoğlu & Sıdıka Tunç, 2021. "Optimal Duration of Innovation Contests," Manufacturing & Service Operations Management, INFORMS, vol. 23(3), pages 657-675, May.
    19. Stefan Szymanski, 2003. "The Assessment: The Economics of Sport," Oxford Review of Economic Policy, Oxford University Press and Oxford Review of Economic Policy Limited, vol. 19(4), pages 467-477, Winter.
    20. Matthias Verbeck & Elisabeth Schulte, 2016. "Contracting with Researchers," MAGKS Papers on Economics 201620, Philipps-Universität Marburg, Faculty of Business Administration and Economics, Department of Economics (Volkswirtschaftliche Abteilung).

    More about this item

    JEL classification:

    • C72 - Mathematical and Quantitative Methods - - Game Theory and Bargaining Theory - - - Noncooperative Games
    • D82 - Microeconomics - - Information, Knowledge, and Uncertainty - - - Asymmetric and Private Information; Mechanism Design
    • D83 - Microeconomics - - Information, Knowledge, and Uncertainty - - - Search; Learning; Information and Knowledge; Communication; Belief; Unawareness

    NEP fields

    This paper has been announced in the following NEP Reports:

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:arx:papers:2006.14860. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    If CitEc recognized a bibliographic reference but did not link an item in RePEc to it, you can help with this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: arXiv administrators (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://arxiv.org/ .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.