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...

The literature on aggregative games, which has been applied in the study of contests, has focused on simultaneous games. We apply aggregative games techniques in a novel fashion in the analysis of sequential lottery contests with n players. It is shown that: (1) there exists a unique subgame...

This paper analyzes grading competition between instructors of elective courses when students shop for high course scores, the instructors maximize class size, and the school imposes a ceiling on mean course scores to limit grade inflation. Under this grading norm, we demonstrate that curriculum...

We allow a contest organizer to bias a contest in a discriminatory way, that is, she can favor specific contestants through the choice of contest success functions in order to maximize total equilibrium effort (resp. revenue). The scope for revenue enhancement through biasing is analyzed and...

Everyone remembers a plot where a disadvantaged individual facing the prospect of failure, spends more effort, turns around the game and wins unexpectedly. Most tournament theories, however, predict the opposite pattern and see the disadvantaged agent investing less effort. We show that 'turn...

This paper develops a tractable dynamic model of competition between two risk-averse portfolio managers who attempt to outperform each other by trading in different stocks, reflecting asset specialization. We characterize explicitly the unique Nash equilibrium portfolio policies, and show that a...

We study the following game: each agent i chooses a lottery over nonnegative numbers whose expectation is equal to his budget b_i. The agent with the highest realized outcome wins (and agents only care about winning). This game is motivated by various real-world settings where agents each choose...

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...