In many contests a subset of contestants is granted preferential treatment which is presumably intended to be advantageous. Examples include affirmative action and biased procurement policies. In this paper, however, I show that some of the supposed beneficiaries may in fact become worse off...

We examine a contest, modelled as an all-pay auction, in which a strong and a weak contestant compete, and where a contestant may suffer from a handicap or benefit from a head start. The former reduces the contestant's score by a fixed percentage; the latter is an additive bonus. The two...