Contest Design with Threshold Objectives

Edith Elkind, Abheek Ghosh and Paul W. Goldberg

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Abstract: We study contests where the designer's objective is an extension of the widely studied objective of maximizing the total output: The designer gets zero marginal utility from a player's output if the output of the player is very low or very high. We consider two variants of this setting, which correspond to two objective functions: binary threshold, where the designer's utility is a non-decreasing function of the number of players with output above a certain threshold; and linear threshold, where a player's contribution to the designer's utility is linear in her output if the output is between a lower and an upper threshold, and becomes constant below the lower and above the upper threshold. For both of these objectives, we study rank-order allocation contests and general contests. We characterize the contests that maximize the designer's objective and indicate techniques to efficiently compute them.

Date: 2021-09, Revised 2025-12
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-des, nep-isf, nep-mic and nep-upt
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