Lobbyists choose what to lobby for. If they can precommit to certain policy proposals, their choice will have an influence on the behavior of opposing lobbyists. Hence lobbyists have an incentive to moderate their policy proposals in order to reduce the intensity of the lobbying contest. This...

This paper studies rent-seeking contests where the contestants do not know the number of actively competing contestants. Two models are compared. In the first, all players are risk neutral; in the second, all have constant absolute risk aversion. If the expected fraction of active contestants is...

The same contestants often meet repeatedly in contests. Behavior in a contest potentially provides information with regard to one's type and can therefore influence the behavior of the opponents in later contests. This paper shows that if effort is observable, this can induce a ratchet effect in...

This paper studies sabotage in a dynamic tournament. Three players compete in two rounds. In the final round, a player who is leading in the race, but not yet beyond the reach of his competitors, is sabotaged more heavily. As a consequence, if all players start off at the same position, they do...

This paper considers incentives for information acquisition ahead of conflicts. First, we characterize the (unique) equilibrium of the all-pay auction between two players with one-sided asymmetric information where one player has private information about his valuation. Then, we use ou rresults...

We study the incentives to share private information ahead of contests, such as markets with promotional competition, procurement contests, or R&D. We consider the cases where firms have (i) independent values and (ii) common values of winning the contest. In both cases, when decisions to share...

Perfectly discriminating contests (all pay auctions) are widely used as a model of situations where individuals devote resources to win some prize. In reality such contests are often preceded by investments of the contestants into their ability to fight in the contest. This paper studies a two...

Lobbyists choose what to lobby for. If they can precommit to certain policy proposals, their choice will have an influence on the behavior of opposing lobbyists. Hence lobbyists have an incentive to moderate their policy proposals in order to reduce the intensity of the lobbying contest. This...

We show that, in several (but not all) standard auctions, (i) private independent values and (ii) complete information are payoff equivalent. The first-price auction generates the same revenue under (i) and (ii); the all-pay auction has lower revenue under (ii).