Contests

After almost a month of work, i have more or less completed my ISM. The abstract is below.

Abstract
Contests are commonly found today. This paper investigates effort levels of competitors of different abilities participating in a one-stage contest for several prizes of equal valuation under two situations. One format is the split contest, where the participants are split into groups and compete only within the group. The other form merges the split contests into one grand contest. We find that grand contests elicit more total effort, but lower expected effort. We also find that participants may not increase their efforts uniformly under certain conditions.


4429 words
A heck of a lot of equations.
A heck of a lot of work.
A final solution.
Tired...