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...