Temporal Information Design in Contests

Temporal Information Design in Contests

Priel Levy, David Sarne, Yonatan Aumann

Proceedings of the Twenty-Eighth International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence
Main track. Pages 428-434. https://doi.org/10.24963/ijcai.2019/61

We study temporal information design in contests, wherein the organizer may, possibly incrementally, disclose information about the participation and performance of some contestants to other (later) contestants. We show that such incremental disclosure can increase the organizer's profit. The expected profit, however, depends on the exact information disclosure structure, and the optimal structure depends on the parameters of the problem. We provide a game-theoretic analysis of such information disclosure schemes as they apply to two common models of contests: (a) simple contests, wherein contestants' decisions concern only their participation; and (b) Tullock contests, wherein contestants choose the effort levels to expend. For each of these we analyze and characterize the equilibrium strategy, and exhibit the potential benefits of information design. 
Keywords:
Agent-based and Multi-agent Systems: Noncooperative Games
Agent-based and Multi-agent Systems: Economic Paradigms, Auctions and Market-Based Systems