This paper studies a large class of imperfectly discriminating contests, referred to as elastic contests, that induce players to either overbid a standing bid or to abstain from bidding altogether. Many common forms of contest are elastic. In any equilibrium of an elastic contest, there is...

The symmetric two-player Hirshleifer (1989) contest is shown to admit a unique equilibrium. The support of the equilibrium strategy is finite and includes, in particular, the zero expenditure level. We also establish a lower bound for the cardinality of the support and an upper bound for the...

This paper studies incentives for the interim voluntary disclosure of verifiable information in probabilistic all-pay contests. Considered are unfair contests, i.e., contests in which, subject to activity conditions, one player (the favorite) is interim always more likely to win than the other...

Szidarovszky and Okuguchi (Games and Economic Behavior, 1997) have provided useful conditions for the existence of a unique pure-strategy Nash equilibrium in rent-seeking games of complete information. In this paper, we generalize their results to contests with incomplete informa tion. Two...