Optimal punishment in contests with endogenous entry

Jonathan Thomas and Zhewei Wang ()

Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization, 2013, vol. 91, issue C, 34-50

Abstract: We study optimal punishment in an all-pay contest with endogenous entry, where the participant with the lowest performance may be punished. When a small punishment is introduced, the lowest ability players drop out and those of medium ability exert less effort, while only the highest ability players exert more effort. A sufficient condition is given for the optimal punishment to be zero if the objective is to maximize the expected total effort. As cost functions become more convex, punishment becomes less desirable. When the objective is to maximize the expected highest individual effort, a positive punishment is desirable under much weaker conditions.

Keywords: Endogenous entry; Punishment; Contests; Total effort; Highest individual effort (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2013
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (12)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0167268113000978
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:jeborg:v:91:y:2013:i:c:p:34-50

DOI: 10.1016/j.jebo.2013.02.007

Access Statistics for this article

Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization is currently edited by Houser, D. and Puzzello, D.

More articles in Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().