{"type":"ScholarlyArticle","title":"Tractable (Simple) Contests","authors":[{"name":"Priel Levy","slug":"priel-levy","given":"Priel","family":"Levy","affiliation":"Department of Computer Science , Bar Ilan University , Israel"},{"name":"David Sarne","slug":"david-sarne","given":"David","family":"Sarne","affiliation":"Department of Computer Science , Bar Ilan University , Israel"},{"name":"Yonatan Aumann","slug":"yonatan-aumann","given":"Yonatan","family":"Aumann","affiliation":"Department of Computer Science , Bar Ilan University , Israel"}],"abstract":"Much of the work on multi-agent contests is focused on determining the equilibrium behavior of contestants. This capability is essential for the principal for choosing the optimal parameters for the contest (e.g. prize amount). As it turns out, many contests exhibit not one, but many possible equilibria, hence precluding contest design optimization and contestants behavior prediction. In this paper we examine a variation of the classic contest that alleviates this problem by having contestants make the decisions sequentially rather than in parallel. We study this model in the setting of a simple contest, wherein contestants only choose whether or not to participate, while their performance level is exogenously set. We show that by switching to the revised mechanism the principal can not only force her most desired pure-strategies based equilibrium to emerge, but also, at times, end up with an equilibrium offering a greater expected profit. Further, we show that in the modified contest the optimal prize can be effectively computed. The theoretical analysis is complemented by comprehensive experiments with people over Amazon Mechanical Turk. Here, we find that the modified mechanism offers great benefit for the principal, both in terms of an increased over-participation in the contest (compared to theoretical expectations) and increased average profit.","doi":"10.24963/ijcai.2018/50","url":"https://ijcai.org/proceedings/2018/50","pdf":"https://ijcai.org/proceedings/2018/0050.pdf","markdown":"https://ijcai.org/proceedings/2018/50.md","bibtex":"https://ijcai.org/proceedings/2018/bibtex/50","volume":{"slug":"2018","title":"Proceedings of the Twenty-Seventh International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence","short_title":"IJCAI 2018","url":"https://ijcai.org/proceedings/2018/","year":2018,"location":"Stockholm","dates":"13-19 July 2018","editors":"Jérôme Lang","isbn":"978-0-9992411-2-7","publisher":"International Joint Conferences on Artificial Intelligence Organization","doi_prefix":"10.24963/ijcai.2018"},"section":"Agent-based and Multi-agent Systems","track":"Main track","number":50,"pages":{"first":361,"last":367},"keywords":["Agent-based and Multi-agent Systems: Noncooperative Games","Agent-based and Multi-agent Systems: Economic Paradigms, Auctions and Market-Based Systems"],"videos":[],"references":[{"position":1,"raw":"[Archak and Sundararajan, 2009] Nikolay Archak and Arun Sun- dararajan. 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