Disclosure and Favoritism in Sequential Elimination Contests
研究两阶段竞赛中，组织者是否应披露选手的临时排名和淘汰结果，以及如何根据临时排名偏袒选手，以最大化总努力或获胜者努力。
We consider a two-stage contest, in which only a subset of contestants enters the finale. We explore the optimal policy for disclosing contestants’ interim status after the preliminary round, i.e., their interim ranking and elimination decision. The optimum depends on the design objective. We fully characterize the conditions under which disclosure or concealment emerges as the optimum. We further allow the organizer to bias the competition based on finalists’ interim rankings, which endogenizes the dynamic structure of the contest. Concealment outperforms in generating total effort, while disclosure prevails when maximizing the expected winner’s total effort.