This paper generalizes the results of Siegel (2009, 2010) to accommodate performance spillovers. More precisely, we show that, if for any player, spillover from other players' performance is independent of his own performance, and if the spillover enters any player's payoff in an additively...

I study optimal disclosure policies in sequential contests. A contest designer chooses at which periods to publicly disclose the efforts of previous contestants. I provide results for a wide range of possible objectives for the contest designer. While different objectives involve different...

In this paper, we allow budget-augmenting negative prizes in all-pay auctions with incomplete information, which in general entail endogenous participation of contestants, and investigate effort-maximizing rank-order-based prize allocation rule. We find that at the optimum, the adoption of...

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...

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'...

Contests are well-established mechanisms for encouraging innovation, incentivizing workers, and advancing R&D. A well-known theoretical result in the contest literature is that greater heterogeneity decreases performance of contestants because of the “discouragement effect.” Leveling the...

This study examines contests in which prizes are affected linearly by aggregate effort. In particular, this research analyzes a contest among individuals as a benchmark to scrutinize the effects of prize externality and sharing-rule information on rent-dissipation rate and social welfare....

Considered are imperfectly discriminating contests in which players may possess private information about the primitives of the game, such as the contest technology, valuations of the prize, cost functions, and budget constraints. We find general conditions under which a given contest of...