Many sales, sports, and research contests are put in place to maximize contestants' performance. We investigate and provide a complete characterization of the prize structures that achieve this objective in settings with many contestants. The contestants may be ex ante asymmetric in their...

This paper studies equilibrium behavior in a class of games that models asymmetric multiprize competitions in which players' costs need not be strictly increasing in their performance. Such costs accommodate various types of asymmetries, including head starts. Head starts capture incumbency...

Bulow and Levin’s (<CitationRef CitationID="CR3">2006</CitationRef>) “Matching and Price Competition” studies a matching model in which hospitals compete for interns by offering wages. We relax the assumption of symmetric linear costs and compare the pricing equilibrium that results to the firm-optimal competitive equilibrium. With...</citationref>

I consider competitions in which, conditional on winning or losing, the effort exerted by a competitor does not necessarily decrease his payoff. This happens, for example, in competitions for promotions in which workers are intrinsically motivated, and in research and development races in which...

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...

This paper studies equilibrium behavior in a class of games that models asymmetric competitions with unconditional and conditional investments. Such competitions include lobbying settings, labor-market tournaments, and R& races, among others. I provide an algorithm that constructs the unique...

This paper studies a class of games, "all-pay contests," which capture general asymmetries and sunk investments inherent in scenarios such as lobbying, competition for market power, labor-market tournaments, and R&D races. Players compete for one of several identical prizes by choosing a score....