Weather insurance is a financial instrument proposed to increase coverage of unprotected weather shocks in developing countries. Structuring sales as group-based products has been argued as a strategy to increase the attractiveness of index insurance, raising the question as to what impacts...

We develop a general framework to study contests, containing the well-known models of Tullock (1980) and Lazear & Rosen (1981) as special cases. The contest outcome depends on players' effort and skill, the latter being subject to symmetric uncertainty. The model is tractable, because a...