Web sites invest significant resources in trying to influence their visibility in online search results. We study the economic incentives of Web sites to invest in this process known as search engine optimization. We focus on methods that improve sites' ranking among the search results without...

If firms compete in all-pay auctions with complete information, silent shareholdings introduce asymmetric externalities into the all-pay auction framework. If the strongest firm owns a large share in the second strongest firm, this may make the strongest firm abstain from bidding. As a...

This paper considers incentives for information acquisition ahead of conflicts. We characterize the (unique) equilibrium of the all-pay auction between two players with one-sided asymmetric information. The type of one player is common knowledge. The type of the other player is drawn from a...

This paper analyzes how all-pay auctions with endogenous prizes can be used to provide effort incentives. We show that wide classes of effort distributions can be implemented as equilibrium outcomes of such games. We also ask how all-pay auctions have to be structured so as to induce high...