To Fight or to Give Up? Dynamic Contests with a Deadline
研究两个玩家在截止日期前通过努力和运气决定胜负的动态竞赛，发现领先者会因动态动量效应而放松努力，总努力不一定随奖励或能力增加，并讨论了竞赛设计对策。
We study dynamic contests between two players whose performance is determined jointly by effort and luck. The players observe each other’s positions in real time. There is a fixed deadline, and the player with a higher performance at the deadline wins the contest. We fully characterize the Markov perfect equilibrium for heterogeneous players. Effort is high when the players are tied but collapses quickly when one of them assumes a lead, due to a dynamic momentum effect. Therefore, total expected effort does not necessarily increase in the prize or in the players’ abilities. We discuss implications for contest design and propose splitting the contest to cool off competition and introducing optimal head-starts for heterogeneous players as possible solutions. This paper was accepted by Ilia Tsetlin, behavioral economics and decision analysis.