IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/oup/restud/v90y2023i5p2370-2394..html
   My bibliography  Save this article

Optimal Feedback in Contests

Author

Listed:
  • Jeffrey C Ely
  • George Georgiadis
  • Sina Khorasani
  • Luis Rayo

Abstract

We obtain optimal dynamic contests for environments where the designer monitors effort through coarse, binary signals—Poisson successes—and aims to elicit maximum effort, ideally in the least amount of time possible, given a fixed prize. The designer has a vast set of contests to choose from, featuring termination and prize-allocation rules together with real-time feedback for the contestants. Every effort-maximizing contest (which also maximizes total expected successes) has a history-dependent termination rule, a feedback policy that keeps agents fully apprised of their own success, and a prize-allocation rule that grants them, in expectation, a time-invariant share of the prize if they succeed. Any contest that achieves this effort in the shortest possible time must in addition be what we call second chance: once a pre-specified number of successes arrive, the contest enters a countdown phase where contestants are given one last chance to succeed.

Suggested Citation

  • Jeffrey C Ely & George Georgiadis & Sina Khorasani & Luis Rayo, 2023. "Optimal Feedback in Contests," The Review of Economic Studies, Review of Economic Studies Ltd, vol. 90(5), pages 2370-2394.
    • Handle: RePEc:oup:restud:v:90:y:2023:i:5:p:2370-2394.
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://hdl.handle.net/10.1093/restud/rdac074
    Download Restriction: Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.
    ---><---

    As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to search for a different version of it.

    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:oup:restud:v:90:y:2023:i:5:p:2370-2394.. 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.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using 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: Oxford University Press (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://academic.oup.com/restud .

    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.