In many contest situations, such as R&D competition and rent seeking, participants’ costs are private information. We report the results of an experimental study of bidding in contests under different information and symmetry conditions about players’ costs of effort. The theory predicts...

In this paper, we investigate behavior in two-player sequential-move contests with complete and incomplete information about the value of the prize, theoretically and experimentally. First, we describe a Bayesian equilibrium of a sequential contest in which both players have private prize...

We model corruption in a society as a result of bargaining for bribes between private citizens and public officials. We investigate the role that incomplete information with respect to the intrinsic moral cost of one's potential corruption partner plays out in his or her propensity to engage in...