From Monopoly to Competition: When Do Optimal Contests Prevail?

7^th May 2024, 13:00 Ashton Lecture Theatre
Dr. Ron Lavi
Department of Economics, University of Bath

Abstract

We study competition among simultaneous heterogeneous contest designers in a general model that allows for a large space of contest design. Contestants choose in which contest to participate, and the goal of each contest designer is to maximize the contestants’ sum of efforts exerted in her contest. Our main result shows that, with symmetric contestants, optimal contests in the monopolistic setting (i.e., those that maximize the sum of efforts in a model with a single contest designer) form Pareto-optimal equilibria when contest designers compete. Under a natural assumption, monopolistic optimal contests are in fact dominant in the competitive case, and the equilibria that they form are unique. In many natural cases, they also maximize the social welfare.

This is joint work with Xiaotie Deng, Yotam Gafni, Tao Lin, and Hongyi Ling

Biography

Ron Lavi is a reader (associate professor) at the economics department, University of Bath, UK. His research focuses on subjects on the border of economics and computation, mainly algorithmic game theory, auction theory, and the efficient design of economic mechanisms. He completed his doctoral studies in computer science at the Hebrew University, Israel, and his post-doctoral studies at the California Institute of Technology. He was a faculty member at Technion – Israel Institute of Technology during 2006 – 2023, a visiting scholar at UC Berkeley during 2013 - 2015, and a consultant / year-long academic visitor at Google, Microsoft research, and Yahoo! Labs.

Additional Materials

• https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4747400