It is notoriously difficult to provide outside parties with adequate incentives for innovation. Contests in which solvers compete for a prize offered by the contest holder have been shown to be an effective incentive mechanism. Despite considerable interest in this concept, we lack a thorough understanding of important aspects of contests; in particular, feedback from the contest holder to the ...

We provide a characterization of participants’ behavior in a contest or tournament where the marginal productivity of effort varies across contestants and individual productivity is private information. We then consider the optimal design of such a contest. We first analyze contestant behavior for the usual type of contest, where the highest output wins. Abilities need not be independently dist...

When designing a contest to motivate effort by salespeople, service employees, franchisees or product development teams, one of the key questions faced by managers is: What should be the optimal proportion of winners and losers? Prevailing marketing theory predicts that the proportion of winners in a contest should always be lower than the proportion of losers. Not only has this theory not been...

We present and categorize a taxonomy of concurrent bug patterns. We then use the taxonomy to create new timing heuristics for ConTest. Initial industrial experience indicates that these heuristics improve the bug finding ability of ConTest. We also show how concurrent bug patterns can be derived from concurrent design patterns. Further research is required to complete the concurrent bug taxonom...

Page 1 UT students placed very well in the 2012 Big Beam Contest, with one team earning first place in the Zone 2 and national competitions. The Big Beam Contest is organized by the Precast/ Prestressed Concrete Institute's (PCI) Student Education Committee, and sponsored by Sika Corp. The contest consists of a zone competition and a national competition. First place winners of each zone, along...

Contestants have to choose whether to initiate a contest or war, or whether to remain peaceful for another period. We find that agents wait and initiate the contest once their rival is sufficiently weak to be an easy target.

A range image segmentation contest was organized in conjunction with ICPR’2000. The goal is to continue the effort of experimentally evaluating range image segmentation algorithms initiated in [3, 4]. This paper summarizes the results of the contest.