Consider a contest for a prize in which each player knows his/her own ability, but may or may not know those of his/her rivals (the complete or incomplete information regimes). Our main result is that, if the value of the prize is high, more effort and output are engendered under incomplete...

We prove that the maximal bid in asymmetric first-price and all-pay auctions is the same for all bidders. Our proof is elementary, and does not require that bidders are risk neutral, or that the distribution functions of their valuations are independent or smooth.

We provide a simple example demonstrating that the unconditional revelation information in a war of attrition with private budget constraints can decrease expected revenue. Our example suggests that information non-revelation can counteract the adverse revenue impact of budget constraints and...

We provide extensions of the Bulow and Klemperer (1996) result when the seller has value for the object above the minimum value of the buyers. The result may fail. We show that the seller does better with more participation and some exclusion than the optimal exclusion of buyers of low value...

We show that the commitment to not allocate may be exploited by a seller/social planner to increase the expected social surplus that can be achieved in the sale of an indivisible unit.