This paper analyzes a two-player all-pay auction with incomplete information. More precisely, one bidder is uncertain about the size of the initial advantage of his rival modeled as a head start in the auction. I derive the unique Bayesian Nash equilibrium outcome for a large class of cumulative...

Games in which players aim to guess a fraction or multiple p of the average guess are known as guessing games or (p-)beauty contests. In this note, we derive a full characterization of the set of rationalizable strategies and the set of pure strategy Nash equilibria for such games as a function...

This paper investigates whether contest schemes induce excessive risk-taking by implementing in the laboratory a novel stopping task based on the contest model of Seel and Strack (2013). In this stylized setting, managers who face contest payoffs have an incentive to delay halting projects with...

In this paper, I study the impact of asymmetric loss constraints on risk-taking behavior in contests. More precisely, contestants have different maximal loss restrictions in the contest model of Seel and Strack (2013), where players choose when to stop a privately observed Brownian motion and...