We develop a model of lobbying in which a time and resource constrained policymaker first chooses which policy proposals to learn about, before choosing which to implement. The policymaker reviews the proposals of the interest groups who provide the highest contributions. We study how policy...

I consider competitions in which, conditional on winning or losing, the effort exerted by a competitor does not necessarily decrease his payoff. This happens, for example, in competitions for promotions in which workers are intrinsically motivated, and in research and development races in...

We examine the properties of all-pay contests in the spirit of Moldovanu and Sela (2001) as the number of entrants grows large under organizer objectives of expected and expected maximum outcomes. Unlike the case with a small number of entrants, with a large number of entrants a single prize...

In this paper, we allow budget-augmenting negative prizes in all-pay auctions with incomplete information, which in general entail endogenous participation of contestants, and investigate effort-maximizing rank-order-based prize allocation rule. We find that at the optimum, the adoption of...

This paper generalizes the results of Siegel (2009, 2010) to accommodate performance spillovers. More precisely, we show that, if for any player, spillover from other players' performance is independent of his own performance, and if the spillover enters any player's payoff in an additively...

This paper studies complete-information, all-pay contests with asymmetric players competing for heterogeneous prizes. In these contests, each player chooses a performance level or "score". The first prize is awarded to the player with the highest score, the second -- less valuable -- prize to...

This note studies contests in which multiple participants compete for two distinct prizes. The participants have distinct constant marginal costs, which are commonly known. We show that the contests have a unique Nash equilibrium, and we characterize the equilibrium payoffs and strategies in...

In a crowdsourcing contest, innovation is outsourced by a firm to an open crowd that competes in generating innovative solutions. Given that the projects typically consist of multiple attributes, how should the firm optimally design a crowdsourcing contest for such a project? We consider two...

We consider contestants who must choose exactly one contest, out of several, to participate in. We show that when the contest technology is of a certain type, or when the number of contestants is large, a self-allocation equilibrium, i.e., one where no contestant would wish to change his choice...

We consider innovation contests for the procurement of an innovation under moral hazard and adverse selection. Innovators have private information about their abilities, and choose unobservable effort in order to produce innovations of random quality. Innovation quality is not contractible. We...