We study round-robin and elimination tournaments with three players where one player is dominant, i.e., he has a higher value of winning than his weaker opponents. In every stage, a pair-wise match is modelled as an all-pay auction. We demonstrate that the expected payoff of the weak players in...

We study two-stage political contests with private entry costs. We show that these political contests could be ineffective, namely, the chance of low ability candidates participating in the contest might be higher than the chance of high ability candidates participating in the contest (and...

We study optimal contest design in situations where the designer can reward high performance agents with positive prizes and punish low performance agents with negative prizes. We link the optimal prize structure to the curvature of distribution of abilities in the population. In particular, we...

We study all-pay auctions with multiple prizes. The players have the same value for all the certain prizes except for one uncertain prize for which each player has a private value. We characterize the equilibrium strategy and show that if the number of prizes is smaller than the number of...

We study multi-stage sequential all-pay contests (auctions) where heterogeneous contestants are privately informed about a parameter (ability) that affects their cost of effort. We characterize the sub-game perfect equilibrium of these multi-stage sequential all-pay contests and analyze the...

We study round-robin tournaments with three players whose values of winning are common knowledge. In every stage a pair-wise match is modelled as an all-pay auction. The player who wins in two matches wins the tournament. We characterize the sub-game perfect equilibrium for symmetric (all...

We study two-player common-value all-pay auctions (contests) with asymmetric information under the assumption that one of the players has an information advantage over his opponent. We characterize the unique equilibrium in these contests, and examine the role of information in determining the...

This paper analyzes how all-pay auctions with endogenous prizes can be used to provide effort incentives. We show that wide classes of effort distributions can be implemented as equilibrium outcomes of such games. We also ask how all-pay auctions have to be structured so as to induce high...

We study a three-stage all-pay auction with two players in which the first player to win two matches wins the best-of-three all-pay auction. The players have values of winning the contest and may have also values of losing, the latter depending on the stage in which the contest is decided. It is...

We study all-pay contests under incomplete information where the reward is a function of the contestant's type and effort. We analyse the optimal reward for the designer when the reward is either multiplicatively separable or additively separable in effort and type. In the multiplicatively...