We study contests where several privately informed agents bid for a price. All bidders bear a cost of bidding that is an increasing function of their bids, and, moreover, bids may be capped. We show that, regardless of the number of bidders, if agents have linear or concave cost functions then...

A contest architecture specifies how the prize sum is split among several prizes, and how the contestants (who are here privately informed about their abilities) are split among several sub-contests. We compare the performance of such schemes to that of grand winner-take-all contests from the...

We study the optimal design of organizations under the assumption that agents in a contest care about their relative position. A principal determines the number and size of status categories in order to maximize output. We first consider the pure status case without tangible prizes. Our results...

We study the optimal design of organizations under the assumption that agents in a contest care about their relative position. A judicious definition of status categories can be used by a principal in order to influence the agents’ performance. We first consider a pure status case where...

We study an elimination tournament with heterogenous contestants whose ability is common-knowledge. Each pair-wise match is modeled as an all-pay auction. Equilibrium efforts are in mixed strategies, yielding complex dynamics: endogenous win probabilities in each match depend on other matches’...