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

We study two-player common-value all-pay auctions (contests) with asymmetric information under the assumption that one of the players has an information advantage over his opponent and both players are budget-constrained. We generalize the results for all-pay auctions with complete information,...

We study a sequential two-stage all-pay auction with two identical prizes. In each stage, the players compete for one prize and each player may win either one or two prizes. The designer may impose a cap on the players' bids in each of the stages. We analyze the equilibrium in this sequential...

We study a round-robin tournament with n symmetric players where in each of the n-1 stages each of the players competes against a different player in the Tullock contest. Each player has a limited budget of effort that decreases within the stages proportionally to the effort he exerted in the...

We study all-pay contests with an exogenous minimal effort constraint where a player can participate in a contest only if his effort (output) is equal to or higher than the minimal effort constraint. Contestants are privately informed about a parameter (ability) that affects their cost of...

We study a sequential (Stackelberg) all-pay auction with two contestants who are privately informed about a parameter (ability) that affects their cost of effort. Contestant 1 (the fi?rst mover) exerts an effort in the fi?rst period, while contestant 2 (the second mover) observes the effort of...

We study two-stage political contests with private entry costs. We show that these political contests could be ineffective, namely, the chance of low ability candidates participating in the contest might be higher than the chance of high ability candidates participating in the contest (and...

We study two-stage all-pay auctions with two identical prizes. In each stage, players compete for one prize. Each player may win either one or two prizes. We analyze the equilibrium strategies where players’ marginal values for the prizes are either declining or inclining

We study a three-stage all-pay auction with two players in which the ?rst player to win two matches wins the best-of-three all-pay auction. The players have values of winning the contest and may have also values of losing, the latter depending on the stage in which the contest is decided. It is...

Under standard assumptions about players'cost functions, we show that a Tullock contest with asymmetric information has a pure strategy equilibrium. Next we study Tullock contests in which players have a common value and a common state-independent linear cost function. A two-player contest in...