On optimal head starts in all-pay auctions

Christian Seel and Cédric Wasser

Economics Letters, 2014, vol. 124, issue 2, 211-214

Abstract: We consider a two-player all-pay auction with symmetric independent private values that are uniformly distributed. The designer chooses the size of a head start that is given to one of the players. The designer’s objective is to maximize a convex combination of the expected highest effort and the expected aggregate effort. Unless the weight on the highest effort is one, small head starts are always worse than no head start. Moreover, the optimal head start is strictly positive if and only if the weight on the highest effort is large enough.

Keywords: Contest; All-pay auction; Head start (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C72 D44 D74 D82 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2014
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (15)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0165176514001852
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:ecolet:v:124:y:2014:i:2:p:211-214

DOI: 10.1016/j.econlet.2014.05.018

Access Statistics for this article

Economics Letters is currently edited by Economics Letters Editorial Office

More articles in Economics Letters from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().