The Role of Information Revelation in Elimination Contests

In this paper, we investigate how information revelation rules affect the existence and the efficiency of equilibria in two-round elimination contests. We establish that there exists no symmetric separating equilibrium under the full revelation rule and find that the non-existence result is very robust. We then characterize a partially efficient separating equilibrium under the partial revelation rule when players' valuations are uniformly distributed. We finally investigate the no revelation rule and find that it is both most efficient and optimal in maximizing the total efforts from the contestants. Within our framework, more information revelation leads to less efficient outcomes