Adam Smith Business School

Ron Lavi, University of Bath

"From Monopoli to Competition: do optimal contests prevail?"
Tuesday, 21 March. 4 pm
Room 305 Main Building

Abstract

We study competition among simultaneous heterogeneous contest designers in a general model that allows for a large space of contest design. Contestants choose in which contest to participate, and the goal of each contest designer is to maximize the contestants’ sum of efforts exerted in their contest. Our main result shows that, with symmetric contestants, optimal contests in the monopolistic setting (i.e., those that maximize the sum of efforts in a model with a single contest designer) form Pareto-optimal equilibria when contest designers compete. Under a natural assumption, monopolistic optimal contests are, in fact dominant in the competitive case, and the equilibria that they form are unique. In many natural cases, they also maximize the social welfare.

Bio

Ron Lavi is a Reader (Associate Professor) at the economics department the University of Bath, UK. He is also on leave from Technion – Israel Institute of Technology, where he has been since 2006. His PhD is from the Hebrew University. In the past, he was a post-doctoral fellow at the California Institute of Technology, a visiting scholar at UC Berkeley, and a year-long academic visitor at Microsoft research and Yahoo! Labs. His research focuses on topics on the border of theoretical computer science and economics, mainly in auction theory, algorithmic game theory, and the efficient design of economic mechanisms.

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First published: 7 March 2023