Screening Signal-Manipulating Agents via Contests

• Tác giả: Yingkai Li, Xiaoyun Qiu
• Ngôn ngữ: eng
• Ký hiệu phân loại: 610.79 Medicine and health
• Thông tin xuất bản: 2023
• Bộ sưu tập: Báo, Tạp chí
• ID: 196471

Tóm tắt

We study the design of screening mechanisms subject to competition and manipulation. A social planner has limited resources to allocate to multiple agents using only signals manipulable through unproductive effort. We show that the welfare-maximizing mechanism takes the form of a contest and characterize the optimal contest. We apply our results to two settings: either the planner has one item or a number of items proportional to the number of agents. We show that in both settings, with sufficiently many agents, a winner-takes-all contest is never optimal. In particular, the planner always benefits from randomizing the allocation to some agents.