Contest Design with Threshold Objectives

Fuente: arXiv
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Auteurs principaux: Elkind, Edith, Ghosh, Abheek, Goldberg, Paul W.
Format: Preprint
Publié: 2021
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author Elkind, Edith
Ghosh, Abheek
Goldberg, Paul W.
author_facet Elkind, Edith
Ghosh, Abheek
Goldberg, Paul W.
contents We study contests where the designer's objective is an extension of the widely studied objective of maximizing the total output: The designer gets zero marginal utility from a player's output if the output of the player is very low or very high. We consider two variants of this setting, which correspond to two objective functions: binary threshold, where the designer's utility is a non-decreasing function of the number of players with output above a certain threshold; and linear threshold, where a player's contribution to the designer's utility is linear in her output if the output is between a lower and an upper threshold, and becomes constant below the lower and above the upper threshold. For both of these objectives, we study rank-order allocation contests and general contests. We characterize the contests that maximize the designer's objective and indicate techniques to efficiently compute them.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2109_03179
institution arXiv
publishDate 2021
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Contest Design with Threshold Objectives
Elkind, Edith
Ghosh, Abheek
Goldberg, Paul W.
Computer Science and Game Theory
Theoretical Economics
We study contests where the designer's objective is an extension of the widely studied objective of maximizing the total output: The designer gets zero marginal utility from a player's output if the output of the player is very low or very high. We consider two variants of this setting, which correspond to two objective functions: binary threshold, where the designer's utility is a non-decreasing function of the number of players with output above a certain threshold; and linear threshold, where a player's contribution to the designer's utility is linear in her output if the output is between a lower and an upper threshold, and becomes constant below the lower and above the upper threshold. For both of these objectives, we study rank-order allocation contests and general contests. We characterize the contests that maximize the designer's objective and indicate techniques to efficiently compute them.
title Contest Design with Threshold Objectives
topic Computer Science and Game Theory
Theoretical Economics
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2109.03179