In this paper, we allow budget-augmenting negative prizes in all-pay auctions with incomplete information, which in general entail endogenous participation of contestants, and investigate effort-maximizing rank-order-based prize allocation rule. We find that at the optimum, the adoption of...

The common-support assumption of future type distributions is standard in the dynamic mechanism design literature (e.g., Baron and Besanko, 1984, Courty and Li, 2000, Eső and Szentes, 2007, Krähmer and Strausz, 2011, and Pavan, Segal, and Toikka, 2014). It is widely perceived that the...

Due to the well-known efficiency--rent extraction trade-off, the optimal mechanism in a pure screening environment (e.g., revenue maximization in auctions or cost minimization in procurement) typically calls for distortions in allocative efficiency when agents possess private information at the...