Why qualifications at the Olympics?

Pavlo Blavatskyy

No 204, IEW - Working Papers from Institute for Empirical Research in Economics - University of Zurich

Abstract: The optimal contest architecture for symmetric imperfectly discriminating contests is shown to be generically the two-stage tournament (rather than the one-stage contest). In the first stage the contestants compete in several parallel divisions for the right to participate in the second stage. In the second stage the short-listed finalists compete for the prize. Given a sufficient number of contestants, the two-stage tournament is either strictly better or at least as good as the one-stage contest for maximizing an individual�s effort, for maximizing the aggregate effort and for minimizing the standard deviation of effort. For maximizing an individual�s effort it is generally optimal to have only two finalists in the second stage. For maximizing the aggregate effort or minimizing the standard deviation of effort the optimal number of finalists in the second stage depends on the discriminating power of the contest success function.

Keywords: symmetric contest; imperfectly discriminating contest; logit; asymmetric equilibria; contest architecture; sport (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C72 L13 L83 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-spo
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (7)

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