 Selecting the best when selection is hardMikhail Drugov, Margaret Meyer and Marc Möller () No 981, Economics Series Working Papers from University of Oxford, Department of Economics Abstract: In dynamic promotion contests, where performance measurement is noisy and constrained to be ordinal, selection of the most able agent can be improved by biasing later stages in favor of early performers. We show that even in the worst-case scenario, where external random factors swamp the difference in agents’ abilities in determining their relative performance, optimal bias is (i) strictly positive and (ii) locally insensitive to changes in the ratio of heterogeneity to noise. To explain these, arguably surprising, limiting results, we demonstrate a close relationship in the limit between optimal bias under ordinal information and the expected optimal bias when bias can be conditioned on cardinal information about relative performance. As a consequence of these two limiting properties, the simple rule of setting bias as if in the worst-case scenario achieves most of the potential gains in selective efficiency from biasing dynamic rank-order contests. Date: 2022-07-14 Downloads: (external link) Related works: Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:oxf:wpaper:981 Access Statistics for this paper More papers in Economics Series Working Papers from University of Oxford, Department of Economics Contact information at EDIRC. |
Is your work missing from RePEc? Here is how to contribute.
Questions or problems? Check the EconPapers FAQ or send mail to .
EconPapers is hosted by the
School of Business at Örebro University.