This note analyzes the effects of a bid cap in an all-pay auction with incomplete information. I find that a non-trivial bid cap affects an agent's expected payment in three ways: An "anti-competition effect" which is associated with this agent's own signal, a pro-competition "good news effect"...

This paper studies the effects of head starts in innovation contests. We analyze a two- firm winner-takes-all contest in which each firm decides when to stop a privately observed search for innovations (with recall). The firm with a superior innovation at the outset has a head start. The firm...

In multi-round elimination tournaments, players experience "psychological momentum". We re-consider the design of elimination tournament plan, by taking into account of various types of psychological momentum. The results show that if there is negative psychological momentum, either persistent...

In an influential paper, Fang (Public Choice 112: 351–371, 2002) asserts that the exclusion principle discovered by Baye et al. (1993) for all-pay auction does not apply to lottery in the case in which an organizer cares about the aggregate effort. Serena (2017) shows that the exclusion...

This paper investigates whether a contest organizer should disclose private information about bidders' abilities in an all-pay auction. Bidders' abilities are affiliated through an underlying state of the world and are accessible by the contest organizer. The organizer decides whether to...

Linkages between agricultural commodity and energy prices have become more complex with increased ethanol production. The concern is whether the new corn–ethanol links lead to volatility spillover transmission between food and energy prices. We investigate asymmetric volatility spillovers...

We examine the effect of publicly disclosing or concealing bidders' types in an all-pay auction with a common bid cap. We call partial (full) disclosure policy the setup where the contest designer's disclosure policy is (not) contingent on type realization. Despite a bid cap possibly increasing...