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 explores the optimal design of biased contests. A designer imposes an identity-dependent treatment on contestants, which varies the balance of the playing field. A generalized lottery contest typically yields no closed-form equilibrium solutions, which nullifies the usual implicit...