We establish the effort-maximizing rule of allocating heterogeneous prizes when contestants privately observe their effort efficiencies. With ex ante symmetric players and increasing virtual effort efficiency, an all pay auction maximizes the total expected effort.

This paper investigates whether a contest organizer should disclose private information about bidders’ abilities in a multi-prize all-pay auction. Bidders’ abilities are randomly distributed and observed by the contest organizer; the organizer decides whether to disclose this information...

In a standard noisy contest, more competition (more contestants) leads to lower individual equilibrium effort. We show that when contestants can make pre-contest investment to enhance their competency, neither equilibrium investment nor individual effort is monotonic in the number of...