We study a rent-seeking contest in which players have heterogeneous and private valuations. In addition to their own type, agents only know that all valuations are drawn from a distribution, of which they only know the mean. We obtain a closed-form solution for agents' optimal level of...

We study a rent-seeking contest in which players have heterogeneous and private valuations. In addition to their own type, agents only know that all valuations are drawn from an unspeciÂ…ed distribution, of which they only know the mean. We obtain a closed-form solution for agentsÂ’...

The theory of economic policy has its roots in the contributions of Tinbergen and Theil, who solved the problem of a policymaker aiming to achieve certain values for his policy targets, or to minimize a loss function defined on those targets, by using the available policy instruments. After...

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...