We apply an indirect evolutionary approach to player’ perceived prize valuations in contests. Evolution in finite populations leads to preferences that overstate the prize’s material value and induce overexpenditure. We establish an equivalence between the behavior evolutionarily stable...

We study contests in which the prize depends on the number of participants, and show that equilibrium effort can be increasing, decreasing, or non-monotonic in the number of participants. This contrasts with the standard result for contests with fixed prizes in which effort is decreasing in the...

This note studies contests in which multiple participants compete for two distinct prizes. The participants have distinct constant marginal costs, which are commonly known. We show that the contests have a unique Nash equilibrium, and we characterize the equilibrium payoffs and strategies in...