[Archimedes Talks Series] From Monopoly to Competition: When Do Optimal Contests Prevail?

Title: From Monopoly to Competition: When Do Optimal Contests Prevail?

Presenter: Prof. Ron Lavi (U. of Bath, UK)


Abstract: We study competition among simultaneous heterogeneous contest designers, allowing a large contest design space. Symmetric contestants choose a contest and each contest designer aims to maximize the contestants’ sum of efforts exerted in her contest. We show that optimal contests in the monopolistic setting (i.e., those that maximize the sum of efforts in a model with a single contest designer) form Pareto-optimal equilibria when contest designers compete. Under a natural assumption, monopolistic optimal contests are in fact dominant in the competitive case, and the equilibria they form are unique. In many natural cases, they also maximize the social welfare.

Joint work with Xiaotie Deng, Yotam Gafni, Tao Lin, and Hongyi Ling


Short Bio: Ron Lavi is a reader (associate professor) at the economics department, University of Bath, UK. His research focuses on subjects on the border of economics and computation, mainly algorithmic game theory, auction theory, and the efficient design of economic mechanisms. He completed his doctoral studies in computer science at the Hebrew University, Israel, and his post-doctoral studies at the California Institute of Technology. He was a faculty member at Technion – Israel Institute of Technology during 2006 – 2023, a visiting scholar at UC Berkeley during 2013 - 2015, and a consultant / academic visitor at Google, Microsoft research, and Yahoo! Labs.