Participation in deterministic contests

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 their opponents’ characteristics, and participation by more than m+1 players is associated with players having incomplete information about their opponents’ characteristics. I show that incomplete information is in fact neither sufficient nor necessary for participation by more than m+1 players.