We study two-stage political contests with private entry costs. We show that these political contests could be ineffective, namely, the chance of low ability candidates participating in the contest might be higher than the chance of high ability candidates participating in the contest (and...

We study optimal contest design in situations where the designer can reward high performance agents with positive prizes and punish low performance agents with negative prizes. We link the optimal prize structure to the curvature of distribution of abilities in the population. In particular, we...

We study a three-stage all-pay auction with two players in which the first player to win two matches wins the best-of-three all-pay auction. The players have values of winning the contest and may have also values of losing, the latter depending on the stage in which the contest is decided. It is...