We study an elimination tournament with heterogenous contestants whose ability is common-knowledge. Each pair-wise match is modeled as an all-pay auction where the winner gets the right to compete at the next round. Equilibrium efforts are in mixed strategies, yielding rather complex play...

We study two-sided matching contests with two sets, A and B, each of which includes a finite number of heterogeneous agents with commonly known types. The agents in each set compete in a lottery (Tullock) contest, and then are assortatively matched, namely, the winner of set A is matched with...

We study optimal contest design in situations where the designer can reward high performance agents with positive prizes and punish low performance agents with negative prizes. We link the optimal prize structure to the curvature of distribution of abilities in the population. In particular, we...

We study the effect of prebidding and postbidding in first-price auctions with a single prize under incomplete information. All the bidders' values are private information except bidder 1's value which is commonly known. Bidder 1 places his bid either before (prebidding auction) or after...

We use perturbation analysis to study independent private-value all-pay auctions with weakly risk-averse buyers. We show that under weak risk aversion: 1) Buyers with low values bid lower and buyers with high values bid higher than they would bid in the risk neutral case. 2) Buyers with low...

We use perturbation analysis to study independent private-value all-pay auctions with weakly risk-averse buyers. We show that under weak risk aversion: 1) Buyers with low values bid lower and buyers with high values bid higher than they would bid in the risk neutral case. 2) Buyers with low...

We analyze a repeated first-price auction in which the types of the players are determined before the first round. It is proved that if every player is using either a belief-based learning scheme with bounded recall or a generalized fictitious play learning scheme, then for sufficiently large...

We study all-pay contests under incomplete information where the reward is a function of the contestant's type and also of his effort. We analyze the optimal reward for the designer when the reward is either multiplicatively separable or additively separable in effort and type. In the...

We study asymmetric second-price auctions under incomplete information. The bidders have two potentially different, commonly known, valuations for the object and private information about their entry costs. The seller, however, does not benefit from these entry costs. We calculate the...

We use perturbation analysis to study independent private-value all-pay auctions with weakly risk-averse buyers. We show that under weak risk aversion: 1) Buyers with low values bid lower and buyers with high values bid higher than they would bid in the risk neutral case. 2) Buyers with low...