We study experimentally the effects of sorting in contests between groups of heterogeneous players whose within-group efforts are perfect substitutes. The theory predicts that higher aggregate effort will be reached when variation in ability between groups is lower, i.e., by a more balanced...

I explore asymmetric equilibria in a Tullock contest of heterogeneous players in the case when the players’ heterogeneity is weak, and the effort optimization problem can be analyzed in the linear approximation. With increasing discriminatory power of the contest, players sequentially drop...