We provide a simple example demonstrating that the unconditional revelation information in a war of attrition with private budget constraints can decrease expected revenue. Our example suggests that information non-revelation can counteract the adverse revenue impact of budget constraints and...

We prove that the maximal bid in asymmetric first-price and all-pay auctions is the same for all bidders. Our proof is elementary, and does not require that bidders are risk neutral, or that the distribution functions of their valuations are independent or smooth.

Consider a contest for a prize in which each player knows his/her own ability, but may or may not know those of his/her rivals (the complete or incomplete information regimes). Our main result is that, if the value of the prize is high, more effort and output are engendered under incomplete...

This paper builds a complete information contest model with endogenous discrimination. We show that a revenue-maximizing contest designer will optimally set a bias towards a weaker contestant against a stronger contestant and completely eliminate the asymmetry between the two. Moreover, in...

We propose an alternative interpretation of additive random noise from the canonical framework of Lazear and Rosen (1981) amenable to applications where players do observe their final outputs at the time when inputs are chosen. This interpretation is suitable to model situations where...