I examine a contest with identity-dependent rules in which contestants are privately informed and ex ante heterogeneous. A contestant may suffer from a handicap or benefit from a head start. The former reduces the contestantʼs score by a fixed percentage; the latter is an additive bonus....

We consider all-pay auctions in the presence of interdependent, affiliated valuations and private budget constraints. For the sealed-bid, all-pay auction we characterize a symmetric equilibrium in continuous strategies for the case of N bidders. Budget constraints encourage more aggressive...

The Babylonian bridal auction, described by Herodotus, is regarded as one of the earliest uses of an auction in history. Yet, to our knowledge, the literature lacks a formal equilibrium analysis of this auction. We provide such an analysis for the two-player case with complete and incomplete...

We introduce three extensions of the Hirshleifer–Skaperdas conflict game to study experimentally the effects of post-conflict behavior and repeated interaction on the allocation of effort between production and appropriation. Without repeated interaction, destruction of resources by defeated...

We provide a game-theoretic model of sequential information aggregation motivated by online question-and-answer forums. An asker posts a question and each user decides when to aggregate a unique piece of information with existing information. When the quality exceeds a certain threshold, the...

In a multi-stage contest known as a two-player race, players display two fundamental behaviors: (1) the laggard will make a last stand in order to avoid the cost of losing; and (2) the player who is ahead will defend his lead if it is threatened. Last stand behavior, in particular, contrasts...

From the regulation of sports to lawmaking in parliament, in many situations one group of people (“agents”) make decisions that affect the payoffs of others (“principals”) who may offer action-contingent transfers in order to sway the agents' decisions. Prat and Rustichini (2003)...

Prosper, today the second largest social lending marketplace with nearly 1.5 million members and $380 million in funded loans, employed an auction mechanism amongst lenders to finance each borrower's loan until 2010. Given that a basic premise of social lending is cheap loans for borrowers, how...

A contract auction establishes a contract between a center and one of the bidders. As contracts may describe many terms, preferences over contracts typically display indifferences. The Qualitative Vickrey Auction (QVA) selects the best contract for the winner that is at least as good for the...