Thus, by concealing the number of contestants, a designer can mitigate the welfare-destroying effects of sabotage, without curbing the provision of value-creating effort.

This is because the resulting performances, which are shaped both by effort and sabotage, are on average higher if people are unaware of how many competitor they compete with.

I run an experiment and largely confirm my theoretical predictions: It is better not to give information about the realized group sizes if the the chance of a single competitor is not too low.

In this paper, I study how revealing the number of contestants affects constructive effort and destructive sabotage in contests where players are unaware of the group size.

Thank you @steffenhuck.bsky.social, Nikolaus Schweizer, and @martaserragarcia.bsky.social for a great review process and for putting this special issue together!

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