【主题】On Later-/earlier-Mover Advantage in Sequential Competitions
【报告人】吴泽南（助理教授，北京大学经济学院）
【时间】2021年6月22日 星期二 14:30–16:00
【地点】经济学院701会议室
【摘要】This paper compares players' ex ante expected payoffs with respect to their timing positions in sequential competitions. The competition is modeled as a multi-player all-pay auction with incomplete information. Players compete for a commonly-valued prize. Their abilities, which determine their effort costs, are privately known, and independently and identically distributed. We impose little restrictions on the game's timing architecture: The contest can be fully sequential, simultaneous, or partially sequential. We demonstrate that players' ex ante expected efforts can be nonmonotone in their timing positions. However, a player always secures a larger payoff when he is assigned to a later period. This later-mover advantage is robust to (i) alternative tie-breaking rules, (ii) the information environment, and (iii) the payment rule for losers. Finally, we show that players' payoff comparison sensitively depends on winner’s payment rule: Drastically contrasting predictions arise when the winner pays the second-highest bid, i.e., in a war of attrition.
