Abstract
We consider a contest game modelling a contest where reviews for m proposals are crowdsourced from n strategic agents} players. Player i has a skill s_iℓ for reviewing proposal ℓ; for her review, she strategically chooses a quality q ∈ { 1, 2, …, Q } and pays an effort f_q ≥ 0, strictly increasing with q. For her effort, she is given a strictly positive payment determined by a payment function, which is either player-invariant, like, e.g., the popular proportional allocation function, or player-specific; for a given proposal, payments are proportional to the corresponding efforts and the total payment provided by the contest organizer is 1. The cost incurred to player i for each of her reviews is the difference of a skill-effort function Λ (s_i, f_q) minus her payment. Skills may vary for arbitrary players and arbitrary proposals. A proposal-indifferent player i has identical skills: s_iℓ = s_i for all ℓ; anonymous players means s_i = 1 for all players i. In a pure Nash equilibrium, no player could unilaterally reduce her cost by switching to a different quality. We present algorithmic results for computing pure Nash equilibria.