This note shows that participation by many players in deterministic contests arises when different players have different cost advantages in different regions of the competition, and not from incomplete information per se

This paper studies equilibrium behavior in a class of games that models asymmetric multiprize competitions in which players’ costs are non-decreasing. Such costs accommodate head starts, which capture incumbency advantages, prior investments, and technological differences. I provide an...

This paper studies equilibrium behavior in a class of games that models asymmetric competitions with unconditional and conditional investments. Such competitions include lobbying settings, labor-market tournaments, and R& races, among others. I provide an algorithm that constructs the unique...

This paper considers participation in deterministic contests for m≥1 identical prizes, which employ an auction-like rule to determine the winners. In most papers that investigate such models, participation by precisely m+1 players is associated with players having complete information about...

We investigate a common-value labor setting in which firms interview a worker prior to hiring. When firms have private information about the worker’s value and interview decisions are kept private, many firms may enter the market, interview, and hire with positive probability. When firms’...

Many sales, sports, and research contests are put in place to maximize contestants’ performance. We investigate and provide a complete characterization of the prize structures that achieve this objective in settings with many contestants. The contestants may be ex-ante asymmetric in their...

Cooperative concepts of renegotiation in repeated games have typically assumed that Paretoranked equilibria could not coexist within the same renegotiation-proof set. With explicit renegotiation, however, a proposal to move to a Pareto-superior equilibrium can be deterred by a different...

We study social learning and innovation in an overlapping generations model, emphasizing the trade-off between marginal innovation (combining existing technologies) and radical innovation (breaking new ground). We characterize both short-term and long-term dynamics of innovation, and the...