We investigate the incentive consequences of introducing the possibility of a draw into a lottery contest. Equilibrium total effort unambiguously decreases when draws are introduced, whereas the equilibrium expected winner's effort increases when the contestants' valuations of the prize become...

This paper develops a novel technique that allows us to characterize the optimal biased generalized lottery contest. In our baseline setting, we search for the optimal multiplicative biases for asymmetric Tullock contests — i.e., the weights placed on contestants' effort entries in the contest...

We study the incentives of players to disclose information on their private valuations of the prize ahead of a rent-seeking contest. We show that information sharing can arise in equilibrium if types are concentrated enough, whereas sharing information is strictly dominated if types are...