This paper studies the optimal design of R&D contests. A “sponsor” (e.g. the US Department of Defense or the World Health Organization) wants to improve the quality of the winning products. To do so, it partitions its budget between two schemes: an inducement prize and efficiency-enhancing...

In a standard noisy contest, more competition (more contestants) leads to lower individual equilibrium effort. We show that when contestants can make pre-contest investment to enhance their competency, neither equilibrium investment nor individual effort is monotonic in the number of...

This paper examines the variation in total effort expended by participants when prizes are awarded in a grand contest as opposed to a number of subcontests. When contestants are homogeneous, under a mild and plausible condition (regular contest technology), a grand contest generates more effort...

This paper investigates the optimal (effort-maximizing) structure of multi-stage sequential-elimination contests. We allow the contest organizer to design the contest structure using two instruments: contest sequence (the number of stages, and the number of contestants remaining after each...

This paper investigates the competitive effect of cross-shareholdings in winner-take-all all-pay auctions with two asymmetric bidders. We show that cross-shareholdings may paradoxically create a “pro-competitive” effect and elicit more effort than a standard contest without cross-ownership....

This paper investigates whether a contest organizer should disclose private information about bidders’ abilities in a multi-prize all-pay auction. Bidders’ abilities are randomly distributed and observed by the contest organizer; the organizer decides whether to disclose this information...