Contests for Status
研究当参赛者在意相对地位时，组织如何最优设计地位等级。主要结论将最优地位划分与参赛者能力分布性质联系起来，并扩展到货币奖励内生决定地位的情形。
We study the optimal design of organizations under the assumption that agents in a contest care about their relative position. A judicious definition of status categories can be used by a principal in order to influence the agents’ performance. We first consider a pure status case where there are no tangible prizes. Our main results connect the optimal partition in status categories to various properties of the distribution of ability among contestants. The top status category always contains an unique element. For distributions of abilities that have an increasing failure rate, a proliferation of status classes is optimal, while in other cases the optimal partition involves some coarseness. Finally, we modify the model to allow for status categories that are endogenously determined by monetary prizes of different sizes. If status is solely derived from monetary rewards, we show that the optimal partition in status classes contains only two categories.