Ying Gao - University of British Columbia will present “Feedback in Selection Tournaments” (joint with Nicole Immorlica, Brendan Lucier, and Markus Mobius)

Abstract: Managers in organizations have access to local, divisional information that allows for close comparison of related projects. We consider how such auxiliary information can be incorporated in the design of meritocratic contests for selection and funding. Via a multi-agent cheap talk model, we discuss what managers can truthfully report to the decision-maker, and/or give as feedback to agents. When such information is ordinal, a decision-maker who wants to make an efficient allocation while discouraging unnecessary effort should elicit rankings to be used as nominations, and wishes to, but cannot, block communication of rankings to agents. When managers have richer, cardinal information but can give feedback to agents about what was reported to the decision-maker, we show that incentive constraints prevent the decision-maker from doing any better than in the ordinal case.