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...

According to the so-called Exclusion Principle (introduced by Baye et alii, 1993), it might be profitable for the seller to reduce the number of fully-informed potential bidders in an all-pay auction. We show that it does not apply if the seller regards the bidders’ private valuations as...

We show that the seller’s optimal reserve price in an all-pay auction with complete information is higher than in a standard auction. We use our results to re-consider some findings of the literature that models lobbying games as all-pay auctions. In particular, we show that the so-called...

We prove that the maximal bid in asymmetric first-price and all-pay auctions is the same for all bidders. Our proof is elementary, and does not require that bidders are risk neutral, or that the distribution functions of their valuations are independent or smooth.

We study a two-stage all-pay auction with two identical prizes. In each stage, the players compete for one prize. Each player may win either one or two prizes. We analyze the unique subgame-perfect equilibrium of our model with two players where each player’s marginal values for the prizes are...

We investigate both theoretically and experimentally the role that information disclosure has on behavior in all pay environments in which all agents must exert costly effort, but only the winner is rewarded. Through the lens of all pay auctions, we show that bidders who have regret concerns...

We study asymmetric all-pay auctions where two privately informed agents bid for a prize. We show that capping the bids is profitable for a designer who wants to maximize the sum of bids (revenue). This finding confims the results of Che and Gale (1998) in the context of incomplete information...

This paper presents an experimental comparison of single and multiple-prize all-pay auctions as fundraising mechanisms to finance public goods. We consider a setting characterized by heterogenous incomes and incomplete information, where single and multiple-prize incentive mechanisms are...

Many economic, political and social environments can be described as contests in which agents exert costly efforts while competing over the distribution of a scarce resource. These environments have been studied using Tullock contests, all-pay auctions and rank-order tournaments. This survey...

We consider a battle between two groups D (defenders) and A (attackers). Each group has the same number of agents, but they differ by their abilities. Every agent confronts only one opponent from the other group once in either an all-pay contest or a Tullock contest such that the number of the...