We study optimal contest design in situations where the designer can reward high performance agents with positive prizes and punish low performance agents with negative prizes. We link the optimal prize structure to the curvature of distribution of abilities in the population. In particular, we...

We study a contest with multiple (not necessarily equal) prizes. Contestants have private information about an ability parameter that affects their costs of bidding. The contestant with the highest bid wins the first prize, the contestant with the second-highest bid wins the second prize, and so...

We study experiments in an auction setting with interdependent valuation. Groups of three players receive private signals and then bid for a single, indivisible item. Valuations for the item differ within groups and depend asymmetrically on a bidder's own and other bidders' signals....

We study the existence of efficient, Bayesian incentive compatible allocation procedures in a general setting with interdependent valuations. Possible applications include multi-object auctions and the provision of public goods. We emphasize the role of multidimensional signals, and, in view of...

sufficient conditions for the efficient allocation to be implementable, and we draw a parallel to situations with direct informational externalities.

We study an elimination tournament with heterogenous contestants whose ability is common-knowledge. Each pair-wise match is modeled as an all-pay auction. Equilibrium efforts are in mixed strategies, yielding complex dynamics: endogenous win probabilities in each match depend on other matches’...