Education can be a filter that solves an assignment problem. We consider what this implies for redistributive taxation in the political process. First we assume that all individuals have undistorted expectations about their abilities. Then we analyse populations in which some group of workers is...

We characterize the equilibrium of the all-pay auction with general convex cost of effort and sequential effort choices. We consider a set of n players who are arbitrarily partitioned into a group of players who choose their efforts ’early’ and a group of players who choose ’late’. Only...

In the equilibrium of the all-pay auction with two groups of individual players who move sequentially, only the player with the lowest effort cost has a positive payoff. This payoff and the overall dissipation crucially depend on group composition.