Contest design with threshold objectives

Journal article

We study contests where the designer’s objective is an extension of the widely studied objective of maximizing the total output: The designer gets zero marginal utility from a player’s output if the output of the player is very low or very high. We consider two variants of this setting, which correspond to two objective functions: binary threshold, where the designer’s utility is a non-decreasing function of the number of players with output above a certain threshold; and linear threshold, where a player’s contribution to the designer’s utility is linear in her output if the output is between a lower and an upper threshold, and becomes constant below the lower and above the upper threshold. For both of these objectives, we study rank-order allocation contests and general contests. We characterize the contests that maximize the designer’s objective and indicate techniques to efficiently compute them.

Authors: Elkind, E; Ghosh, A; Goldberg, PW

• Alternative title: Contest design with threshold objectives
• Publication status: Published
• Peer review status: Peer reviewed
• Publisher: Springer
• Journal: International Journal of Game Theory
• Volume: 54
• Issue: 2
• Article number: 43
• Publication date: 2025-11-24
• Acceptance date: 2025-10-03
• DOI: 10.1007/s00182-025-00964-0
• EISSN: 1432-1270
• ISSN: 0020-7276
• Language: English
• Keywords: All-pay auctions; Mechanism design; Incomplete information; Contest theory