The model of perfect competition is one of the most famous, most important, and most misunderstood concepts in economics. Rather than aiming to be a full-blown model of real-world competitive markets, the perfect competition model isolates the decentralized coordination mechanism inherent in all...

We consider a model of infinitely repeated lottery contests in which the winner of the prior contest (incumbent) additionally gains the opportunity to bias the subsequent contest by exerting early effort in an intermediate stage. An effortmaximizing contest designer strategically chooses the...