We study contests where several privately informed agents bid for a prize. 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 bidders have linear or concave cost functions, then...

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 a contest with multiple, nonidentical prizes. Participants are privately informed about a parameter (ability) affecting their costs of effort. The contestant with the highest effort wins the first prize, the contestant with the second-highest effort wins the second prize, and so on...

We study optimal contest design in situations where the designer can reward high performance agents with positive prizes and punish low performance agents with negative prizes. We link the optimal prize structure to the curvature of distribution of abilities in the population. In particular, we...

Two sellers decide on their discrete supply of a homogenous good. There is a finite number of buyers with unit demand and privately known valuations. In the first model, there is a centralized market place where a uniform auction takes place. In the second, there are two distinct auction sites,...