This paper investigates optimal contest design when the designer’s payoff is increasing in competitive balance between contestants. A two-player contest with asymmetric effort costs (asymmetric abilities) is considered. Competitive balance is measured by the difference in winning probabilities...

This note provides an alternative proof for the equivalence of decreasing absolute prudence (DAP) in the expected utility framework and in a two-parametric approach where utility is a function of the mean and the standard deviation. In addition, we elucidate that the equivalence of DAP and the...