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Cardinal Contests

Published: 21 July 2018 Publication History

Abstract

We model and analyze cardinal contests, where a principal running a rank-order tournament has access to an absolute measure of the quality of agents’ submissions in addition to their relative rankings. We show that a mechanism that compares each agent’s output quality against a threshold to decide whether to award her the prize corresponding to her rank is optimal amongst the set of all mixed cardinal-ordinal mechanisms where the jth-ranked submission receives a fraction of the jth prize that is a non-decreasing function of the submission’s quality. Furthermore, the optimal threshold mechanism uses exactly the same threshold for each rank.

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cover image ACM Transactions on Economics and Computation
ACM Transactions on Economics and Computation  Volume 6, Issue 2
May 2018
159 pages
ISSN:2167-8375
EISSN:2167-8383
DOI:10.1145/3241735
Issue’s Table of Contents
Permission to make digital or hard copies of part or all of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for third-party components of this work must be honored. For all other uses, contact the Owner/Author.

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Association for Computing Machinery

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Publication History

Published: 21 July 2018
Accepted: 01 March 2018
Revised: 01 September 2017
Received: 01 September 2016
Published in TEAC Volume 6, Issue 2

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Author Tags

  1. Contests
  2. crowdsourcing
  3. game theory
  4. optimal contest design

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