Key points are not available for this paper at this time.
We study a contest with multiple, nonidentical prizes. Participants are privately informed about a parameter (ability) affecting their costs of effort. The contestant with the highest effort wins the first prize, the contestant with the second-highest effort wins the second prize, and so on until all the prizes are allocated. The contest's designer maximizes expected effort. When cost functions are linear or concave in effort, it is optimal to allocate the entire prize sum to a single “first” prize. When cost functions are convex, several positive prizes may be optimal. (JEL D44, J31, D72, D82)
Moldovanu et al. (Fri,) studied this question.
Synapse has enriched 5 closely related papers on similar clinical questions. Consider them for comparative context: