Abstract
This paper studies a class of games, "all-pay contests," which capture general asymmetries and sunk investments inherent in scenarios such as lobbying, competition for market power, labor-market tournaments, and R&D races. Players compete for one of several identical prizes by choosing a score. Conditional on winning or losing, it is weakly better to do so with a lower score. This formulation allows for differing production technologies, costs of capital, prior investments, attitudes toward risk, and conditional and unconditional investments, among others. I provide a closed-form formula for players' equilibrium payoffs and analyze player participation. A special case of contests is multiprize, complete-information all-pay auctions.
| Original language | English (US) |
|---|---|
| Pages (from-to) | 71-92 |
| Number of pages | 22 |
| Journal | Econometrica |
| Volume | 77 |
| Issue number | 1 |
| DOIs | |
| State | Published - Jan 2009 |
All Science Journal Classification (ASJC) codes
- Economics and Econometrics