A well-known theoretical result in the contest literature is that greater heterogeneity decreases performance of contestants because of the "discouragement effect." Leveling the playing field by favoring weaker contestants through bid-caps and favorable tie-breaking rules can reduce the...

Contest or auction designers who want to maximize the overall revenue are frequently concerned with a trade-off between contest homogeneity and inclusion of bidders with high valuations. In our experimental study, we find that it is not profitable to exclude the most able bidder in favor of...

In this paper, we generalize the General Lotto game and the Colonel Blotto game to allow for battlefield valuations that are heterogeneous across battlefields and asymmetric across players, and for the players to have asymmetric resource constraints. We completely characterize Nash equilibrium...