We investigate the effects of information feedback in rent-seeking games with two different contest structures. In the deterministic contest a contestant receives a share of the rent equal to her share of rent-seeking expenditures, while in the stochastic contest a contestant wins the entire...

We consider contestants who must choose exactly one contest, out of several, to participate in. We show that when the contest technology is of a certain type, or when the number of contestants is large, a self-allocation equilibrium, i.e., one where no contestant would wish to change his choice...

We experimentally study overbidding in contests and find that overbidding is significantly higher when subjects are given a large per-experiment endowment rather than when the endowment is given per-period. Risk-aversion and non-monetary utility of winning can partially explain our findings

We investigate optimal favoritism using identity-contingent prizes in a two-player Tullock model. Besides the usual balance effect, prize allocation has an extra efficiency effect: One additional unit of prize tends to induce more effort, if it is used as the winning prize for the stronger...

In many real-world contests (political elections / lobbying for public projects), contestants try to engage supporters (unemployed youth / local residents) to fight for them. Such contests have the following features: a significant part of a contestant's supporter compensation is contingent upon...

This paper examines multi-battle contests whose extensive form can be represented in terms of a finite state machine. We start by showing that any contest that satisfies our assumptions decomposes into two phases, a principal phase (in which states cannot be revisited) and a concluding...

In noisy contests where only the winners entry will eventually be implemented, the suitable objective is to maximize the quality of the entry of the expected winner. We compare the optimal set of rules in contests under such an objective to the one under maximization of the sum of contestants'...

In this paper, we compare two procedures for allocating a sequence of fixed prizes in multi-stage nested Tullock contests, in which the number of prizes equals the number of contestants. In a winner-leave (loser-leave) procedure, in each stage, the prizes of the stage are allocated to winners...

In an influential paper, Fang (Public Choice 112: 351–371, 2002) asserts that the exclusion principle discovered by Baye et al. (1993) for all-pay auction does not apply to lottery in the case in which an organizer cares about the aggregate effort. Serena (2017) shows that the exclusion...

We consider a simple contest game with draws where with some probability none of the contestants is selected as winner. If such an outcome occurs, then the contest is repeated in the next period unless either one of the contestants wins the prize or until a final last period is reached. Allowing...