All-Pay Contests

Ron Siegel

Econometrica, 2009, vol. 77, issue 1, 71-92

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. Copyright 2009 The Econometric Society.

Date: 2009
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Working Paper: All-Pay Contests (2006)
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