This paper proposes a multi-prize "reverse" nested lottery contest model, which can be viewed as the "mirror image" of the conventional nested lottery contest of Clark and Riis (1996a). The reverse-lottery contest model determines winners by selecting losers based on contestants' one-shot effort...

In a standard noisy contest, more competition (more contestants) leads to lower individual equilibrium effort. We show that when contestants can make pre-contest investment to enhance their competency, neither equilibrium investment nor individual effort is monotonic in the number of...

"This paper derives the effort-maximizing contest rule and the optimal endogenous entry in a context where potential participants bear fixed entry costs. The organizer is allowed to design the contest under a fixed budget with two strategic instruments: the value of the prize purse and a...

This paper proposes a multi-winner noisy-ranking contest model. Contestants are ranked in a descending order by their perceived outputs, and rewarded by their ranks. A contestant's perceivable output increases with his/her autonomous effort, but is subject to random perturbation. We establish,...

This paper examines the variation in total effort expended by participants when prizes are awarded in a grand contest as opposed to a number of subcontests. When contestants are homogeneous, under a mild and plausible condition (regular contest technology), a grand contest generates more effort...

This paper derives the effort-maximizing contest rule and the optimal endogenous entry in a context where potential participants bear fixed entry costs. The organizer is allowed to design the contest under a fixed budget with two strategic instruments: he sets the value of the prize purse, and...

This paper investigates the optimal (effort-maximizing) structure of multi-stage sequential-elimination contests. We allow the contest organizer to design the contest structure using two instruments: contest sequence (the number of stages, and the number of contestants remaining after each...

This paper studies the optimal design of R&D contests. A “sponsor” (e.g. the US Department of Defense or the World Health Organization) wants to improve the quality of the winning products. To do so, it partitions its budget between two schemes: an inducement prize and efficiency-enhancing...

This paper investigates the competitive effect of cross-shareholdings in winner-take-all all-pay auctions with two asymmetric bidders. We show that cross-shareholdings may paradoxically create a “pro-competitive” effect and elicit more effort than a standard contest without cross-ownership....