Optimal matching in best-of-three team contests

We study optimal matching strategies in best-of-three team contests, where a contest organizer assigns three players of varying abilities from each team to three pairwise battles conducted simultaneously or sequentially. The team winning at least two battles receives the prize. Contrary to the conventional wisdom of “leveling the playing field”, we show that pairing similar-ability players maximizes total expected effort only when within-team ability gaps are relatively small. However, when top players value the prize sufficiently high, strategically mismatching the weaker players increase the importance of the high-ability battle, thus increasing total effort. This finding is robust across various contest success functions, asymmetric teams, and best-of-k contests.