Outcome Disclosure and Temporal Refinement in Multi-Battle Team Contests

2026-08-23

AI Summary

研究通过披露结果和细化时间安排来优化团队竞赛中的非金钱工具使用，以提高产出，适用于不同成本结构。

Abstract

A team-contest designer values output rather than expenditure; nonlinear conversion makes the distinction consequential. We study two non-pecuniary instruments in majority-rule contests decided by pairwise all-pay battles with private abilities: disclosing resolved outcomes and splitting the battle schedule into finer blocks. Neither changes a battle's average pivotality; each only redistributes it across histories. Under nested information structures, this redistribution makes equilibrium ability-scaled expenditure weakly more dispersed player by player without changing its mean; expected aggregate expenditure is invariant across all designs considered. The resulting convex-order comparison ranks expected total output: convex output costs favor no disclosure and coarser temporal structures, concave costs favor full disclosure and finer ones, and linear costs make both comparisons neutral. The rankings hold for finite-support and smooth continuous-type ability distributions. The mechanism extends to degree-zero component contest technologies with a unique equilibrium outcome distribution. No and full disclosure bound every admissible public garbling.

Problem

• Outcome Disclosure
• Temporal Refinement
• Team Contests

Innovation

• Outcome Disclosure
• Temporal Refinement
• Non-pecuniary Instruments
• Nested Information Structures
• Convex-order Comparison