Tournaments with Midterm Reviews

Alex Gershkov and Motty Perry

Discussion Paper Series from The Federmann Center for the Study of Rationality, the Hebrew University, Jerusalem

Abstract: In many tournaments investments are made over time and conducting a review only once at the end, or also at points midway through, is a strategic decision of the tournament designer. If the latter is chosen, then a rule according to which the results of the different reviews are aggregated into a ranking must also be determined. This paper takes a first step in the direction of answering how such rules should be optimally designed. A characterization of the optimal aggregation rule is provided for a two-agent two-stage tournament. In particular, we show that treating the two reviews symmetrically may result in an equilibrium effort level that is inferior to the one in which only a final review is conducted. However, treating the two reviews lexicographically by first looking at the final review, and then using the midterm review only as a tie-breaking rule, strictly dominates the option of conducting a final review only. The optimal mechanism falls somewhere in between these two extreme mechanisms. It is shown that the more effective the first-stage effort is in determining the final review’s outcome, the smaller is the weight that should be assigned to the midterm review in determining the agents’ ranking.

Pages: 22 pages
Date: 2006-01
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (3)

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Related works:
Journal Article: Tournaments with midterm reviews (2009)
Working Paper: Tournaments with Midterm Reviews (2006)
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