We consider symmetric rent-seeking contests with independent private valuations of the contest prize. For a two-parameter specification with continuous types, we fully characterize the Bayesian equilibrium, and study its basic properties. The willingness to waste is a hump-shaped function of the...

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...

Any symmetric mixed-strategy equilibrium in a Tullock contest with intermediate values of the decisiveness parameter ("2 R ∞") has countably infinitely many mass points. All probability weight is concentrated on those mass points, which have the zero bid as their sole point of accumulation....

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...

This paper considers rent-seeking games in which a small percentage change in a player's bid has a large percentage impact on her odds of winning, i.e., on the ratio of her respective probabilities of winning and losing. An example is the Tullock contest with a high R. The analysis provides a...

We characterize the equilibrium set of the n-player Hirshleifer contest with homogeneous valuations. A symmetric equilibrium always exists. It necessarily corresponds to multilateral peace for sufficient noise and uses finite-support randomized strategies otherwise. Asymmetric equilibria are...

Any symmetric mixed-strategy equilibrium in a Tullock contest with intermediate values of the decisiveness parameter ("2 R ∞") has countably infinitely many mass points. All probability weight is concentrated on those mass points, which have the zero bid as their sole point of accumulation....