Contests with endogenous discrimination

This paper builds a complete information contest model with endogenous discrimination. We show that a revenue-maximizing contest designer will optimally set a bias towards a weaker contestant against a stronger contestant and completely eliminate the asymmetry between the two. Moreover, in contrast to fair contest models, where the revenue-maximizing contest designer is better off if the weaker contestant becomes stronger or the stronger contestant becomes weaker, our model shows that the opposite result may arise.