Centralized assignment of prizes and contestants
研究竞赛设计者如何选择竞赛数量、奖金分配及参赛者类型分配，发现单一大型竞赛能最大化总努力，并探讨了目标变化、多重参与和倾斜赛场等扩展情形。
Abstract We study a contest design problem in which a designer chooses how many Tullock contests to have, how much to award to each contest, and which contestants (of high or low type) should be assigned to which contest. Our main result is that a single grand contest maximizes total effort. We consider three extensions. First, when the designers’ objective changes to maximizing the effort submitted by the winning contestant, we find that the optimal design involves the high-type contestants being assigned to a set of pairwise contests. Second, under multiple participations (a player’s effort is valid in multiple contests, as in several applications), running a contest open to all, along with a parallel contest open only to low types, increases total effort over a single grand contest. Third, tilting the playing field (a player’s effort is multiplied by a tilting factor) in favor of low types increases total effort in a single grand contest, even more than what is possible with multiple participations; thus, in applications, a quota reserved for traditionally disadvantaged categories results in lower total effort than a grand contest that optimally handicaps advantaged categories.