We investigate optimal favoritism using identity-contingent prizes in a two-player Tullock model. Besides the usual balance effect, prize allocation has an extra efficiency effect: One additional unit of prize tends to induce more effort, if it is used as the winning prize for the stronger...

This paper proposes a tractable model of a dynamic contest where players have private information about the contest's prize. We show that private information helps to encourage players who have fallen behind, leading to an increase in aggregate incentives. We derive the optimal information...

We study signaling in dynamic contests with heterogeneous players. A privately-informed challenger faces a sequence of rivals of known types. The type of future rivals determines which signal the challenger wants to produce, whereas the strategic response of current rivals determines the extent...

We consider a variant of the Tullock rent-seeking contest. Under symmetric information we determine equilibrium strategies and prove their uniqueness. Then, we assume contestants to be privately informed about their costs of effort. We prove existence of a pure-strategy equilibrium and provide a...

We consider a general class of imperfectly discriminating contests with privately informed players. We show that findings by Athey (2001) imply the existence of a Bayesian Nash equilibrium in monotone pure strategies.

This paper studies a contest in which players with unobservable types may form an alliance in a pre-stage of the game to join their forces and compete for a prize. We characterize the pure strategy equilibria of this game of incomplete information. We show that if the formation of an alliance is...

This paper studies a contest in which players with unobservable types may form an alliance in a pre-stage of the game to join their forces and compete for a prize. We characterize the pure strategy equilibria of this game of incomplete information. We show that if the formation of an alliance is...

We survey recent theoretical and empirical literature on political economics of non-democracies. Nondemocratic regimes face multiple challenges to their rule, both internal, such as palace coups or breakdown of their support coalition, and external, such as mass protests or revolutions. We...

When are comparative statements credible? For instance, when can a professor rank different students for an employer, or a stock analyst rank different stocks for a client? We show that simple complementarity conditions ensure that an expert with private information about multiple issues can...