Social Choice and Welfare

47, pages939–957(2016)

Axiomatization of Reverse Nested Lottery Contests

Jingfeng Lu  Zhewei Wang

The reverse nested lottery contest proposed by Fu et al. (2014) is the “mirror image” of the classical nested lottery contest of Clark and Riis (1996a), which has been axiomatized by Lu and Wang (2015). In this paper, we close the gap and provide an axiomatic underpinning for the reverse nested lottery contest by identifying a set of six necessary and sufficient axioms. These axioms proposed specify the properties of contestants’ probabilities of being ranked the lowest among all players or within subgroups, while the axiomatization of the classical nested lottery contest by Lu and Wang (2015) relies on axioms on contestants’ probabilities of being ranked the highest among all players or within subgroups.