Optimal grading contests

Sumit Goel

Games and Economic Behavior, 2025, vol. 152, issue C, 133-149

Abstract: We study the design of effort-maximizing grading schemes between agents with private abilities. Assuming agents derive value from the information their grade reveals about their ability, we find that more informative grading schemes induce more competitive contests, i.e., contests with greater inequality across prizes. In the contest framework, we investigate the effect of manipulating individual prizes and increasing competition on expected effort, identifying conditions on ability distributions and cost functions under which these transformations may encourage or discourage effort. Our results suggest that more informative grading schemes encourage effort when agents of moderate ability are highly likely, and discourage effort when such agents are unlikely.

Date: 2025
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0899825625000569
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:gamebe:v:152:y:2025:i:c:p:133-149

DOI: 10.1016/j.geb.2025.04.005

Access Statistics for this article

Games and Economic Behavior is currently edited by E. Kalai

More articles in Games and Economic Behavior from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().