This paper examines the effects of disclosing the actual number of bidders in contests with endogenous stochastic entry. I study a standard all-pay auction in which bidders' valuations are commonly known but their participation decisions private. Each potential bidder has to incur an entry cost...

The contest entails one prize and n potential bidders. Each bidder receives a signal about the value of the prize and has a signal-dependent probability of participation. All bidders bear a cost of bidding that is an increasing function of their bids. It is shown that the contest organizer...

This note analyzes the effects of a bid cap in an all-pay auction with incomplete information. I find that a non-trivial bid cap affects an agent's expected payment in three ways: An "anti-competition effect" which is associated with this agent's own signal, a pro-competition "good news effect"...

In an influential paper, Fang (Public Choice 112: 351–371, 2002) asserts that the exclusion principle discovered by Baye et al. (1993) for all-pay auction does not apply to lottery in the case in which an organizer cares about the aggregate effort. Serena (2017) shows that the exclusion...

This paper investigates whether a contest organizer should disclose private information about bidders' abilities in an all-pay auction. Bidders' abilities are affiliated through an underlying state of the world and are accessible by the contest organizer. The organizer decides whether to...

We examine the effect of publicly disclosing or concealing bidders' types in an all-pay auction with a common bid cap. We call partial (full) disclosure policy the setup where the contest designer's disclosure policy is (not) contingent on type realization. Despite a bid cap possibly increasing...