Information feedback in a dynamic tournament

This paper studies the problem of information revelation in a multi-stage tournament where the agents' effort in each stage gives rise to a stochastic performance signal privately observed by the principal. The principal controls the agents' effort incentive through the use of a feedback policy, which transforms his private information into a public announcement. The optimal feedback policy is one that maximizes the agents' expected effort. The paper identifies when the principal should use the no-feedback policy that reveals no information, or the full-feedback policy that reveals all his information. (C) 2010 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.