A note on the exclusion principle

According to the so-called Exclusion Principle (introduced by Baye et alii, 1993), it might be profitable for the seller to reduce the number of (fullyinformed) potential bidders in an all-pay auction. We show that the Exclusion Principle does not apply if the seller regards the bidders' private valuations as belonging to the class of identical and independent distributions with a monotonic hazard rate. -- all-pay auctions ; Exclusion Principle ; monotonic hazard rate ; economic theory of lobbying