Winner’s Effort Maximization in Large Contests

We investigate the temporal structure that maximizes the winner's effort in large homogeneous contests, thus extending Hinnosaar (2019)'s analysis of total effort. We find that the winner's effort ranges from a lower bound of 0 to an upper bound of one third of the value of the prize, depending on the temporal structure; the upper (lower) bound is reached with an infinite number of players playing sequentially (simultaneously) in the first periods (period). This is in line with Hinnosaar's results for total effort. Nevertheless, when compare the speed of convergence of different temporal structures to the upper bound for the winner's effort, we prove the suboptimality of the fully sequential temporal structure, which is dominated by an initial number of fully sequential moves and a greater number of fully simultaneous moves in the very last period. This is in contrast with Hinnosaar's results for total effort