Gambling in contests with regret

TL;DR

This paper analyzes gambling contests where agents observe a process and choose stopping times to maximize winning probability, introducing penalties for suboptimal strategies and providing a new derivation of existing results.

Contribution

It offers a novel Lagrangian derivation of Seel & Strack's model and extends it to include penalties for suboptimal strategies.

Findings

New Lagrangian derivation of the gambling contest model.

Extension of the model with penalties for suboptimal strategies.

Insights into strategic behavior under penalties.

Abstract

This paper discusses the gambling contest introduced in Seel & Strack (Gambling in contests, Discussion Paper Series of SFB/TR 15 Governance and the Efficiency of Economic Systems 375, Mar 2012.) and considers the impact of adding a penalty associated with failure to follow a winning strategy. The Seel & Strack model consists of $n$-agents each of whom privately observes a transient diffusion process and chooses when to stop it. The player with the highest stopped value wins the contest, and each player's objective is to maximise their probability of winning the contest. We give a new derivation of the results of Seel & Strack based on a Lagrangian approach. Moreover, we consider an extension of the problem in which in the case when an agent is penalised when their strategy is suboptimal, in the sense that they do not win the contest, but there existed an alternative strategy which would have resulted in victory.