We consider a variant of the Tullock rent-seeking contest. Under symmetric information we determine equilibrium strategies and prove their uniqueness. Then, we assume contestants to be privately informed about their costs of effort. We prove existence of a pure-strategy equilibrium and provide a...

We study a model of imperfectly discriminating contests with two ex ante symmetric agents. We consider four institutional settings: Contestants move either sequentially or simultaneously and in addition their types are either public or private information. We find that an effort-maximizing...

We consider a standard two-player all-pay auction with private values, where the valuation for the object is private information to each bidder. The crucial feature is that one bidder is favored by the allocation rule in the sense that he need not bid as much as the other bidder to win the...