Contest theory has been used in Industrial Organization to describe phenomena like R&D races, or efforts to defend a monopoly position. When pricing behavior is constrained by regulators, competition can also take the form of a contest. This paper reports on an experimental test of the effects of asymmetry in the Tullock contest success function. Both the simultaneousmove and sequential-move fr...

Using crowd-based contests to acquire creative designs is increasingly popular. In this study, I examine how client-provided information in design contests affect participants’ strategy and contest submissions. In these contests, clients often provide examples of designs that they like, thereby signaling their design preference. Using prospect theory, I relate participants’ contest payoffs and ...

This thesis studies contests (also called tournaments) wherein a contest organizer seeks solutions to a problem from independent agents. The seeker employs a subset of these solutions, and awards the best solution(s). For example, since 2012, Samsung has organized an innovation contest, called the Smart App Challenge, that invites independent programmers to develop novel applications for its mo...

This case study investigated relationships between personality, mood states changes, coping strategies, self-set goals, and self-efficacy in an elite judo player. A transactional perspective of psychological responses over time was used to guide data analysis. The ambient mood is proposed to contribute to the interpretation of, and reaction to, events during competition, which lead to subsequen...

The City of Philadelphia recently redesigned districts for its council members based upon the 2010 census. The districting process evinced considerable public interest and engagement because council districts from the prior census had significant shortcomings. During the 2010 redistricting process, several public interest groups came together to organize a districting contest. The organizers ho...

Recognition of geometric primitives such as line and arc helps in automatic conversion of line drawing document images into electronic form. A large number of raster to vector methods can be found in the literature. A line and arc segmentation contest was held in conjunction with the tenth IAPR International Workshop on Graphics Recognition (GREC 2013) for comparing performance of different met...

Automatic conversion of line drawings from paper to electronic form requires the recognition of geometric primitives like lines, arcs, circles etc. in scanned documents. Many algorithms have been proposed over the years to extract lines and arcs from document images. To compare different state-of-the-art systems, an arc segmentation contest was held in the seventh IAPR International Workshop on...

This paper is a report on our participation in the Bond Trade Price Contest and Online Product Sales Contest with two main contributions. First, we provide a detailed description of our approaches in both contests, which includes our expert model based on support vector machines in the Bond Trade Price Contest and our ensemble of gradient boosted trees and Gaussian processes in the Online Produ...

This paper studies the optimal contest design problem when the abilities of the risk neutral contestants are independent private information. The contest designer has a fixed prize budget to elicit efforts from the contestants. We consider all possible mechanisms that allocate prizes and punishments (negative prizes) across the contestants. We find that an optimal contest mechanism does not exi...

The Mini Grand Challenge outdoor robot design contest was developed at the Penn State Abington campus to promote advances in robot education and technology. Partly inspired by the DARPA Grand Challenge, ground robots must navigate unmarked pathways on a suburban college campus and reach waypoint goals. Robots must also interact and entertain spectators during travel along the designated route. ...