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Welfare maximizing contest success functions when the planner cannot commit

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  • Luis Corchon

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  • Matthias Dahm

    ()

Abstract

We analyze how a contest organizer chooses the winner when the contestants.efforts are already exerted and commitment to the use of a given contest success function is not possible. We define the notion of rationalizability in mixed-strategies to capture such a situation. Our approach allows to derive different contest success functions depending on the aims and attitudes of the decider. We derive contest success functions which are closely related to commonly used functions providing new support for them. By taking into account social welfare considerations our approach bridges the contest literature and the recent literature on political economy.

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Bibliographic Info

Paper provided by Universidad Carlos III, Departamento de Economía in its series Economics Working Papers with number we097343.

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Date of creation: Nov 2009
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Handle: RePEc:cte:werepe:we097343

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Keywords: Endogenous contests; Contest success function; Mixed-Strategies;

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Cited by:
  1. Pelosse, Yohan, 2011. "Equivalence of optimal noisy-ranking contests and Tullock contests," Journal of Mathematical Economics, Elsevier, vol. 47(6), pages 740-748.
  2. Matthias Dahm & Robert Dur & Amihai Glazer, 2012. "How a Firm Can Induce Legislators to Adopt a Bad Policy," CESifo Working Paper Series 3788, CESifo Group Munich.

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