We study the design of all-pay contests when the organizer's objective is to maximize the expected winner's effort and contestants have private information about their valuations for the prize. We identify sufficient conditions for every optimal contest to involve differential treatment of ex...

I investigate the design of effort-maximizing mechanisms when agents have both private information and convex effort costs, and the designer has a fixed prize budget. I first demonstrate that it is always optimal for the designer to utilize a contest with as many participants as possible....