All-Pay Contests

This paper studies a class of games, quot;All-Pay Contestsquot;, which captures general asymmetries and sunk investments inherent in scenarios such as lobbying, competition for market power, labor-market tournaments, and Ramp;D races. Players compete for one of several identical prizes by choosing a score. Conditional on winning or losing, it is weakly better to do so with a lower score. This formulation allows for differing production technologies, costs of capital, prior investments, attitudes towards risk, and conditional and unconditional investments, among others. I provide a closed-form formula for players' equilibrium payoffs, and analyze player participation. A special case of contests is multi-prize, complete-information all-pay auctions