期刊名称:Economics Discussion Papers / Department of Economics, College of Management and Economics, University of Guelph
出版年度:2005
卷号:2005
出版社:University of Guelph
摘要:I consider a two-stage elimination contest with uninformed and informed players.
Informed players can signal their type to future uninformed opponents through their
efforts in the first stage. Relative to the benchmark case of complete information, I find
that an informed player exerts a higher effort in stage 1, if the uninformed future
opponent is weaker than him. Conversely, he exerts a lower effort, if the uninformed
opponent is stronger than him. This result is consistent with a conjecture in Rosen (AER,
1986). Intuitively, informed players may want to scare future uninformed opponents by
exerting higher efforts in earlier rounds. However, trying to scare a stronger player may
not be a sensible strategy because he might compete very fiercely. In equilibrium,
informed players who are stronger than uninformed players separate from informed
players who are weaker than uninformed players. This result differs from Horner and
Sahuguet (2003) where stronger informed players pool with weaker informed players.