Speaker:

Dong Hao (University of Electronic Science and Technology of China)

Time:

• 16:20-17:20 (Time in Beijing)
• March 17, 2023 (Friday)

Venue:

518, Research Building 4

Abstract:

In a contest, a principal holding a task posts it to a crowd. People in the crowd then compete to win the principal’s rewards. Although a crowd is usually networked and people influence each other via social ties, existing contest theories do not aim to answer how interpersonal relationships influence people’s incentives and behaviors and thereby affect the contest performance. In this work, we take people’s social ties as a key factor in the modeling and designing of agents’ incentives in contest design. We establish two contest mechanisms by which the principal can impel the agents to invite their neighbors to contribute to the task. The first mechanism has a symmetric Bayesian Nash equilibrium, and it is very simple for agents to play and easy for the principal to predict the contest performance. The second mechanism has an asymmetric Bayesian Nash equilibrium, and agents’ behaviors in equilibrium show a vast diversity which is strongly related to their social relations. The Bayesian Nash equilibrium analysis of these new mechanisms reveals that, besides agents’ intrinsic abilities, the social relations among them also play a central role in a competitive environment. Moreover, we design an effective algorithm to automatically compute the Bayesian Nash equilibrium of the invitation contest and further adapt it to large graphs.