In many contests, a subset of contestants is granted preferential treatment which is presumably intended to be advantageous. Examples include affirmative action and biased procurement policies. In this paper, however, I show that some of the supposed beneficiaries may in fact become worse off...

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....

Comparative statics for contests with two privately informed and ex ante heterogeneous contestants are analyzed. Strategies and payoffs are examined and it is shown that total effort may increase when one contestant becomes weaker. The second part of the paper considers dynamic contests in which...