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arXiv · 2109.03179

Contest Design with Threshold Objectives

Edith Elkind·Abheek Ghosh·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.

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Edith Elkind, Abheek Ghosh, Paul W. Goldberg. 2021-09-07. Contest Design with Threshold Objectives. https://arxiv.org/abs/2109.03179

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