UC Berkeley

This article studies competition in contests with a focus on the news industry that is increasingly influenced by social media. The model assumes publishers to pick a single topic from a large pool based on the topics' prior “success” probabilities, thereby “chasing” potentially successful topics. Firms that publish topics that become successful divide a “reward” which can change with the number of competing firms and the number of successful topics. The results show that share structures can be categorized into three types that, in turn, lead to qualitatively different outcomes for the contest.