We develop a model of contests on networks. Each player is “connected” to a set of contests and exerts a single effort to increase the probability of winning each contest to which she is connected. We characterize equilibria under the Tullock contest success function and explore how behavior...

We study contests in which the prize depends on the number of participants, and show that equilibrium effort can be increasing, decreasing, or non-monotonic in the number of participants. This contrasts with the standard result for contests with fixed prizes in which effort is decreasing in the...

We investigate optimal favoritism using identity-contingent prizes in a two-player Tullock model. Besides the usual balance effect, prize allocation has an extra efficiency effect: One additional unit of prize tends to induce more effort, if it is used as the winning prize for the stronger...

We consider multi-stage elimination contests, where agents efforts at different stages generate some output for the organizers. Depending on the output function we characterize the optimal prize structure of the tournament and show that it is almost efficient. We have found that in some cases...