We study a sequential all-pay auction where heterogeneous contestants are privately informed about a parameter (ability) that affects their cost of effort. In the case of two contestants, contestant 1 (the first mover) makes an effort in the first period, while contestant 2 (the second mover)...

In aggregative games, each player's payoff depends on her own actions and an aggregate of the actions of all the players (for example, sum, product or some moment of the distribution of actions). Many common games in industrial organization, political economy, public economics, 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...

In many situations the individuals who can generate some output must enter a contest for appropriating this output. This Paper analyses the investment incentives of such agents and the role of incumbency advantages in the contest. Depending on the advantages, an increase in the productivity of...

We examine prizes as an inducement for innovation using a novel dataset of awards for inventiveness offered by the Royal Agricultural Society of England from 1839 to 1939. At annual shows the RASE held competitive trials and awarded medals and monetary prizes (exceeding one million pounds in...

We study all-pay auctions with multiple prizes. The players have the same value for all the certain prizes except for one uncertain prize for which each player has a private value. We characterize the equilibrium strategy and show that if the number of prizes is smaller than the number of...

We use cumulative reaction functions to compare long-run market structures in aggregative oligopoly games. We first compile an IO toolkit for aggregative games. We show strong neutrality properties across market structures. The aggregator stays the same, despite changes in the number of firms...