Task arrangement in team competitions

Abstract

In this paper, we study task arrangement in competitions between two teams, each with two players. Two complementary tasks, together with a multiplicative random factor, jointly determine a team’s performance. Each player is responsible for one task on a team, and the team with better performance wins. We show that equilibrium actions do not depend on whether the tasks are conducted simultaneously in a single stage or sequentially, with one task in each stage. We further find that each team should allocate their players according to their comparative advantages in different tasks to maximize the team’s winning chance.