We study the design of screening mechanisms subject to competition and manipulation. A social planner has limited resources to allocate to multiple agents using only signals manipulable through unproductive effort. We show that the welfare-maximizing mechanism takes the form of a contest and characterize the optimal contest. We apply our results to two settings: either the planner has one item or a number of items proportional to the number of agents. We show that in both settings, with sufficiently many agents, a winner-takes-all contest is never optimal. In particular, the planner always benefits from randomizing the allocation to some agents.

翻译：我们研究在竞争与操纵条件下筛选机制的设计。一位社会规划者仅能通过可被非生产性努力操纵的信号向多个代理分配有限资源。我们发现，最大化社会福利的机制采用竞赛形式，并刻画了最优竞赛的特征。我们将研究结果应用于两种情境：规划者持有一件物品，或持有与代理数量成比例的若干物品。研究表明，在这两种情境中，当代理数量足够多时，赢家通吃型竞赛绝非最优。尤其值得注意的是，规划者总能通过随机化对部分代理的分配而获益。