The experimental evidence on contests often reports overspending of contest participants compared to the theoretical Nash equilibrium outcome. We show that a standard level-k model may rationalize overspending in contests. This result complements the existing literature on overspending in...

I characterize the optimal accuracy level r of an unbiased Tullock contest between two players with heterogeneous prize valuations. The designer maximizes the winning probability of the strong player or the winner's expected valuation by choosing a contest with an all-pay auction equilibrium...

We investigate observed rent dissipation-the ratio of the total costs of rent seeking to the monetary value of the rent-in winner-take-all and share contests, where preferences are more general than usually assumed in the literature. With concave valuation of the rent, we find that contests can...

Transparency initiatives are well-known tools to foster trust and empower citizens. To explain why some governments introduce them but others do not, we model these initiatives as a signal that complements the information provided by visible government performance and conduct a randomized survey...

I study sequential contests where the efforts of earlier players may be disclosed to later players by nature or by design. The model has many applications, including rent seeking, R&D, oligopoly, public goods provision, and tragedy of the commons. I show that information about other players'...

In this paper, we examine the class of congestion games with player-specific payoff functions introduced by Milchtaich, I. (1996). Focusing on the special case of two resources, we give a short and simple method for identifying all Nash equilibria in pure strategies. We also provide a...

We introduce a non-cooperative game model in which players' decision nodes are partially ordered by a dependence relation, which directly captures informational dependencies in the game. In saying that a decision node v is dependent on decision nodes v1,…,vk, we mean that the information...

We consider the design of a contest in which the prize may motivate not only productive efforts, but also some damaging aggressive behavior by contestants. The organizer must choose prizes and an enforcement regime defined as a limit on how much aggressiveness will be tolerated and the...

We study two-sided matching contests with two sets, A and B, each of which includes a finite number of heterogeneous agents with commonly known types. The agents in each set compete in a lottery (Tullock) contest, and then are assortatively matched, namely, the winner of set A is matched with...

This paper explores the optimal design of biased contests. A designer imposes an identity-dependent treatment on contestants, which varies the balance of the playing field. A generalized lottery contest typically yields no closed-form equilibrium solutions, which nullifies the usual implicit...