We study the optimal design of organizations under the assumption that agents in a contest care about their relative position. A judicious de?nition of status categories can be used by a principal in order to in?uence the agents?performance. We first consider a pure status case where there are...

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 and both players are budget-constrained. We generalize the results for all-pay auctions with complete information,...

Under standard assumptions about players'cost functions, we show that a Tullock contest with asymmetric information has a pure strategy equilibrium. Next we study Tullock contests in which players have a common value and a common state-independent linear cost function. A two-player contest in...

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 Perfect Baysian equilibrium of these multi-stage sequential all-pay contests and analyze the...

We study two-player common-value all-pay auctions in which the players have ex-ante asymmetric information represented by finite partitions of the set of possible values of winning. We consider two families of such auctions: in the first, one of the players has an information advantage...

We study a sequential Tullock contest with two stages and two identical prizes. The players compete for one prize in each stage and each player may win either one or two prizes. The players have either decreasing or increasing marginal values for the prizes, which are commonly known, and there...

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 the optimal design of organizations under the assumption that agents in a contest care about their relative position. A principal determines the number and size of status categories in order to maximize output. We first consider the pure status case without tangible prizes. Our results...

We study the optimal design of organizations under the assumption that agents in a contest care about their relative position. A judicious definition of status categories can be used by a principal in order to influence the agents’ performance. We first consider a pure status case where...

Two sellers decide on their discrete supply of a homogenous good. There is a finite number of buyers with unit demand and privately known valuations. In the first model, there is a centralized market place where a uniform auction takes place. In the second, there are two distinct auction sites,...