Collaborative Paper by Professor Wang Zhewei and Associate Researcher Zhou Lixue from the School of Economics Published in Journal of Mathematical Economics
Recently, the collaborative paper Design tools for all-pay contests: Aligning incentives and balancing the playing field by Professor Wang Zhewei and Associate Researcher Zhou Lixue from the School of Economics was officially published in Journal of Mathematical Economics, an authoritative economics journal. The collaborators of the paper are Professor Lu Jingfeng from the National University of Singapore and Young Teacher Gao Rui from Shandong Youth University of Political Science (Ph.D. graduate of the School of Economics in 2025).
Aiming at the contest design problem in multi-dimensional competition, this paper compares two main mechanisms under the constraint of fixed expected prize budget: first, the "prize allocation" method, which distributes the prize budget to multiple independent single-dimensional sub-contests; second, the "scoring rule" method, which determines the winner in a unified multi-dimensional contest based on the comprehensive performance calculated by the "rule". Analysis based on the all-pay contest model shows that when the designer's payoff function has inter-dimensional performance complementarity, the optimal scoring rule is always superior to the optimal prize allocation in incentive effect. This advantage is mainly achieved through two channels: the "incentive alignment effect" prompts participants' strategic choices to be consistent with the designer's goals; the "balancing effect" tilts towards weak participants through rule design, directly motivating them to make efforts, and indirectly strengthening the competitive pressure on strong participants, thereby improving the overall equilibrium output level.
Many classic literatures show that a key factor for multi-dimensional contests to be superior to single-dimensional sub-contests is that the randomness in multiple dimensions is reduced due to the superposition of interference items. By analyzing an all-pay contest without any noise interference, this paper further reveals that multi-dimensional contests can exert advantages through two other effects, namely incentive alignment effect and balancing effect.3
Wang Zhewei is a professor at the School of Economics at Shandong University. His main research directions are contest and conflict theory, organizational economics and game theory. Research achievements have been published in authoritative economics journals such as Games and Economic Behavior, Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization, International Journal of Industrial Organization, and Journal of Mathematical Economics. He has presided over many national-level projects and participated in many major fund projects of the National Natural Science Foundation and National Social Science Fund of China. He serves as a reviewer for projects of the National Natural Science Foundation and National Social Science Fund of China. He has been selected as an Outstanding Young and Middle-aged Scholar of Shandong University and a Young Expert of "Taishan Scholar" of Shandong Province.
Zhou Lixue is an associate researcher at the School of Economics at Shandong University. His main research direction is microeconomic theory. Research achievements have been published in authoritative economics journals such as Games and Economic Behavior, Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization, and Journal of Mathematical Economics. He has presided over projects of the National Natural Science Foundation of China and the Natural Science Foundation of Shandong Province.
