I study sequential contests where the efforts of earlier players may be disclosed to later players by nature or by design. The model has a range of applications, including rent seeking, R&D, oligopoly, public goods provision, and tragedy of the commons. I show that information about other...

Multi-battle team contests are ubiquitous in real-life competitions. All temporal structures of multi-battle team contests yield the same total effort, as demonstrated by Fu, Lu, and Pan (2015, American Economic Review, 105(7): 2120-40)'s remarkable temporal-structure independence. Rather than...

We study the sorting of contestants across Tullock contests, and the allocation of a prize budget across these contests. Our benchmark result is that total effort is maximized by a unique grand contest and contestant exclusions decrease total effort. We consider two extensions of our benchmark...

We consider a variant of the Tullock rent-seeking contest. Under symmetric information we determine equilibrium strategies and prove their uniqueness. Then, we assume contestants to be privately informed about their costs of effort. We prove existence of a pure-strategy equilibrium and provide a...

This paper considers incentives for information acquisition ahead of conflicts. First, we characterize the (unique) equilibrium of the all-pay auction between two players with one-sided asymmetric information where one player has private information about his valuation. Then, we use ou rresults...

We study the incentives to share private information ahead of contests, such as markets with promotional competition, procurement contests, or R&D. We consider the cases where firms have (i) independent values and (ii) common values of winning the contest. In both cases, when decisions to share...

We study all-pay auctions where each player observes her private value as well as a noisy private signal about the opponent’s value, following Fang and Morris’s (J Econ Theory 126(1):1–30, 2006) analysis of winner-pay auctions with multidimensional private signals. A unique symmetric...

We characterize the equilibrium of the all-pay auction with general convex cost of effort and sequential effort choices. We consider a set of n players who are arbitrarily partitioned into a group of players who choose their efforts "early" and a group of players who choose "late". Only the...

In the equilibrium of the all-pay auction with two groups of individual players who move sequentially, only the player with the lowest effort cost has a positive payoff. This payoff and the overall dissipation crucially depend on group composition. -- Sequential all-pay auction ; complete...