In many real-world contests (political elections / lobbying for public projects), contestants try to engage supporters (unemployed youth / local residents) to fight for them. Such contests have the following features: a significant part of a contestant's supporter compensation is contingent upon...

We examine an endogenous, sunk budget extension of Myerson's (1993) two-candidate model of political competition in which candidates simultaneously allocate an exogenous level of a use-it-or-lose-it persuasive advertising resource across a homogeneous electorate of unit measure. We completely...

We consider a best-of-three Tullock contest between two ex-ante identical players. An effort-maximizing designer commits to a vector of player-specific biases (advantages or disadvantages). In our benchmark model the designer chooses victory-dependent biases (i.e., the biases depend on the...

I analyse a group contest in which groups decide over two dimensions of membership-exclusivity: whether a member is allowed to join the group at all, and whether this member is allowed to join another group as well. If the prize is mostly private, group leaders do not offer membership in...