are considered, all-pay auctions and lottery contests. For all-pay auctions the optimal bias is derived in closed form: It … advanced by Baye et al. (1993) becomes obsolete in this case. In contrast, the optimally biased lottery induces larger entry of … the all-pay auction revenue dominates the lottery contest for all levels of heterogeneity among contestants. The incentive …

We characterize revenue maximizing head starts for all-pay auctions and lottery contests with many heterogeneous … players. We show that under optimal head starts all-pay auctions revenue-dominate lottery contests for any degree of … biased all-pay auction or lottery contest. While head starts are more effective than multiplicative biases in all …

and lottery contests. Our main result reveals that an appropriately biased all-pay auction revenue dominates the optimally … biased lottery contest for all levels of heterogeneity among contestants. Moreover, such a biased all-pay auction will never … make use of the celebrated exclusion principle advanced by Baye et al. (1993). -- All-pay auction ; lottery contest ; bias …

-type endogenously determined lottery is always superior to an all-pay-auction; it yields larger expected efforts (revenues) for the … contest designer. If the contest can be unfair (structural discrimination is allowed), then the optimal lottery cannot be …

and lottery contests. Our main result reveals that an appropriately biased all-pay auction revenue-dominates the optimally … biased lottery contest for all levels of heterogeneity among contestants. Moreover, such a biased all-pay auction will never …

and lottery contests with several heterogeneous contestants. Two instruments of favoritism are considered: Head starts … first-best revenue. In the lottery contest, head starts are less effective than biases and combining both instruments cannot … further increase revenue. As all-pay auctions revenue-dominate lottery contests under optimal biases, we thus obtain an …

-type endogenously determined lottery is always superior to an all-pay-auction; it yields larger expected efforts (revenues) for the … optimal lottery is equal to his expected payoff under the optimal all-pay auction. -- contest design ; efforts (revenue …) maximization ; discrimination ; endogenous lottery ; all-pay auction …