We study contests in which contestants are homogeneous and have convex effort costs. Increasing contest competitiveness, by making prizes more unequal, scaling up the competition, or adding new contestants, always discourages effort. These results have significant implications: although often...

This paper presents a strategic model of risk-taking behavior in the framework of a continuous time contest. Formally, we analyze a dynamic game in which each player decides when to stop a privately observed Brownian Motion with drift. Only the player who stops his process at the highest value...

We consider a two-player contest model in which breakthroughs arrive according to privately observed Poisson processes. Each player's process continues as long as she exerts costly effort. The player who collects most breakthroughs until a predetermined deadline wins a prize.We derive Nash...

We develop a model with many advertisers (products) and many advertising markets (media). Each advertiser sells to a different segment of consumers, and each medium has a different ability to target advertising messages. We characterize the competitive equilibrium in the media markets and...

We study price discrimination in a market in which two firms engage in Bertrand competition. Some consumers are contested by both firms, and other consumers are “captive” to one of the firms. The market can be divided into segments, which have different relative shares of captive and...