Contests with small noise and the robustness of the all-pay auction

Christian Ewerhart

No 186, ECON - Working Papers from Department of Economics - University of Zurich

Abstract: This paper considers all-pay contests in which the relationship between bids and allocations reflects a small amount of noise. Prior work had focused on one particular equilibrium. However, there may be other equilibria. To address this issue, we introduce a new and intuitive measure for the proximity to the all-pay auction. This allows, in particular, to provide simple conditions under which actually any equilibrium of the contest is both payoff equivalent and revenue equivalent to the unique equilibrium of the corresponding all-pay auction. The results are shown to have powerful implications for monopoly licensing, political lobbying, electoral competition, optimally biased contests, the empirical analysis of rent-seeking, and dynamic contests.

Keywords: Contests; increasing returns; mixed-strategy Nash equilibrium; robustness of the all-pay auction; payoff equivalence; revenue equivalence (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C72 D45 D72 L12 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2015-01, Revised 2017-06
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-gth, nep-hpe and nep-mic
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

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Related works:
Journal Article: Contests with small noise and the robustness of the all-pay auction (2017)
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:zur:econwp:186

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