Information Disclosure in Dynamic Research Contests

We study the design of information disclosure in a dynamic multi-agent research contest, where each agent privately searches for innovations and submits his best to compete for a winner-takes-all prize. We find that although submission is a onetime event for each agent, different disclosure policies on the agents' submissions induce different equilibrium behavior, making the design of disclosure a useful instrument for the contest sponsor. We characterize equilibrium behavior in a public contest where submissions are immediately revealed and in a hidden contest where no submission information is revealed to the agents. In addition, for contests with indefinite duration, the public disclosure policy is an optimal policy among a natural set of disclosure policies