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Contest design

Supervisor

Suitable for

MSc in Computer Science
Mathematics and Computer Science
Computer Science
Computer Science, Part C
Mathematics and Computer Science, Part C

Abstract

Description

A "contest" refers to a widespread form of competition that has attracted a huge literature in Economics. In a contest, players expend costly effort that translate to some form of output, or score. Then they (or some of them) receive prizes associated with their ranking on output/score. The project would study a class of contests considered in a paper "Ranking games that have competitiveness-based strategies". One aspect of the project would be to study the convergence properties of the Fictitious Play procedure, applied to these games. We also envisage addressing, experimentally, the challenge of handicapping. Handicapping involves ranking the players on the values of monotonic functions of their outputs, rather than just raw outputs, in order to elicit greater effort; the challenge is to choose the best functions. The project is experimental, with some scope for analytical work (specifically, for the problem of optimal handicapping in the 2-player case).

Prerequisites

familiarity with basic probability theory.