Disclosure and Favoritism in Sequential Elimination Contests

Qiang Fu and Zenan Wu

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, 2022, vol. 14, issue 4, 78-121

Abstract: 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.

JEL-codes: C72 L22 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2022
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (8)

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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:aea:aejmic:v:14:y:2022:i:4:p:78-121

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DOI: 10.1257/mic.20200230

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