Choosing Fair Lotteries to Defeat the Competition

We study the following game: each agent i chooses a lottery over nonnegative numbers whose expectation is equal to his budget b_i. The agent with the highest realized outcome wins and agents only care about winning). This game is motivated by various real-world settings where agents each choose a gamble and the primary goal is to come out ahead. Such settings include patent races, stock market competitions, and R&D tournaments. We show that there is a unique symmetric equilibrium when budgets are equal. We proceed to study and solve extensions, including settings where agents must obtain a minimum outcome to win; where agents choose their budgets (at a cost); and where budgets are private information.Strategic gambling, Nash equilibrium, fair lotteries

Learning more by doing less

Self-interested agents (e.g., interest groups, researchers) produce verifiable evidence in an attempt to convince a principal (e.g., legislator, funding organization) to act on their behalf (e.g., introduce legislation, fund research). Agents provide less informative evidence than the principal prefers since doing so maximizes the probability the principal acts in their favor. If the principal faces budget or other constraints that limit the number of agents whose proposals she can support, then agents produce more-accurate evidence as they compete for priority. Under reasonable conditions, the principal is better off when her capacity to act is limited.strategic search, evidence production, persuasion, lobbying

Learning More by Doing Less

A principal must decide whether to implement each of two independent proposals (e.g., earmark requests, policy reforms, grant funding) of unknown quality. Each proposal is represented by an agent who advocates by producing evidence about quality. Although the principal prefers the most-informative evidence, agents strategically choose less-informative evidence to maximize the probability the principal implements their proposals. In this setting, we show how limited capacity (i.e., the ability of the principal to implement at most one of the two proposals) can motivate agents to produce more-informative evidence in an effort to convince the principal that their proposal is better than the alternative. We derive reasonable conditions under which the principal prefers limited capacity to unlimited capacity.Strategic search, Evidence production, Persuasion, Lobbying.

Choosing Fair Lotteries to Defeat the Competition

We study the following game: each agent i chooses a lottery over nonnegative numbers whose expectation is equal to his budget bi. The agent with the highest realized outcome wins (and agents only care about winning). This game is motivated by various real-world settings where agents each choose a gamble and the primary goal is to come out ahead. Such settings include patent races, stock market competitions, and R&D tournaments. We show that there is a unique symmetric equilibrium when budgets are equal. We proceed to study and solve extensions, including settings where agents must obtain a minimum outcome to win; where agents choose their budgets (at a cost); and where budgets are private information