In a deterministic contest or all-pay auction, all rents are dissipated when information is complete and contestants are identical. As one contestant becomes "stronger", that is, values the prize more, total expenditures are known to decrease monotonically. Thus, asymmetry among contestants...

In many contests a subset of contestants is granted preferential treatment which is presumably intended to be advantageous. Examples include affirmative action and biased procurement policies. In this paper, however, I show that some of the supposed beneficiaries may in fact become worse off...

We study the initial recruitment of individuals in the political sector. We propose an equilibrium model of political recruitment by two political parties competing in an election. We show that political parties may deliberately choose to recruit only mediocre politicians, in spite of the fact...

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 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 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...

We study all-pay auctions (or wars of attrition), where the highest bidder wins an object, but all bidders pay their bids. We consider such auctions when two bidders alternate in raising their bids and where all aspects of the auction are common knowledge including bidders' valuations. We...

We study two-player all-pay contests in which there is a positive probability of a tied outcome. We show that the players' efforts in equilibrium do not depend on the expected prize in the case of a tie given that this prize is smaller than the prize for winning. The implications of this result...

We examine a contest, modelled as an all-pay auction, in which a strong and a weak contestant compete, and where a contestant may suffer from a handicap or benefit from a head start. The former reduces the contestant's score by a fixed percentage; the latter is an additive bonus. The two...

Comparative statics for all-pay auctions with two heterogeneous and privately informed bidders are analyzed. General results are provided for when one bidder becomes stochastically weaker. The comparative statics are fully characterized for truncations. Moreover, we show that expected revenue...