This paper offers a complementary empirical approach that might be better suited to identify the extent of political favoritism in a multi-decision-maker institution than the standard identification strategy. The typical diff-in-diff identification strategy to estimate political favoritism,...

We analyze the revenue-enhancing potential of favoring specific contestants in complete information all-pay auctions and lottery contests with several heterogeneous contestants. Two instruments of favoritism are considered: Head starts that are added to the bids of specific contestants and...

We use high frequency data on TV and radio advertising together with data on online sales for lottery tickets to measure the short run effects of advertising. We find them to be strong and to last for up to about 4 hours. They are the bigger the less time there is until the draw. We develop the...

This paper studies a school district that was federally mandated to adopt a race-blind lottery system to fill seats in its oversubscribed magnet schools. The district had previously integrated its schools by conducting separate admissions lotteries by race to offset its predominantly black...

Although risk aversion has been used in economic models for over 275 years, the past few decades have shown how higher order risk attitudes are also quite important. A behavioral approach to defining such risk attitudes was developed by Eeckhoudt and Schlesinger (2006), based upon simple lottery...

This paper examines conflicts in which performance is measured by the players' success or failure in multiple component conflicts, commonly termed "battlefields". In multi-battlefield conflicts, behavioral linkages across battlefields depend both on the technologies of conflict within each...

The favorite-longshot bias describes the longstanding empirical regularity that betting odds provide biased estimates of the probability of a horse winning - longshots are overbet, while favorites are underbet. Neoclassical explanations of this phenomenon focus on rational gamblers who overbet...

The means of contest design may include differential taxation of the prize. This paper establishes that, given a revenue-maximizing contest designer who faces a balanced-budget constraint, the optimal taxation scheme corresponding to an all-pay auction is appealing in two senses. First, it...

This paper evaluates differential prize taxation and structural discrimination as a means of increasing efforts in the most widely studied contests. We establish that a designer who maximizes efforts subject to a balanced-budget constraint prefers dual discrimination, namely, change of the...