This paper explores the optimal design of biased contests. A designer imposes an identity-dependent treatment on contestants that varies the balance of the playing field. A generalized lottery contest typically yields no closed-form equilibrium solutions, which nullifies the usual implicit programming approach to optimal contest design and limits analysis to restricted settings. We propose an alternative approach that allows us to circumvent this difficulty and characterize the optimum in a general setting under a wide array of objective functions without solving for the equilibrium explicitly. Our technique applies to a broad array of contest design problems, and the analysis it enables generates novel insights into incentive provisions in contests and their optimal design. For instance, we demonstrate that the conventional wisdom of leveling the playing field, which is obtained in limited settings in previous studies, does not generally hold.

中文翻译：

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偏向竞赛的优化设计

本文探讨了偏向竞赛的优化设计。设计师对参赛者施加了一种与身份相关的待遇，以改变比赛场地的平衡。广义的彩票竞赛通常不会产生封闭形式的均衡解，这使优化竞赛设计的常用隐式编程方法无效，并将分析限制在受限设置中。我们提出了一种替代方法，它使我们能够绕过这一困难，并在广泛的目标函数下在一般设置中表征最优，而无需明确求解均衡。我们的技术适用于广泛的竞赛设计问题，它所支持的分析为竞赛中的激励条款及其优化设计提供了新颖的见解。例如，