Lotteries vs. All-Pay Auctions in Fair and Biased Contests

Gil S. Epstein, Yosef Mealem, Shmuel Nitzan

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

21 Scopus citations

Abstract

The form of contests for a single fixed prize can be determined by a designer who maximizes the contestants' efforts. This article establishes that, under common knowledge of the two asymmetric contestants' prize valuations, a fair Tullock-type endogenously determined lottery is always superior to an all-pay-auction; it yields larger expected efforts (revenues) for the contest designer. If the contest can be unfair (structural discrimination is allowed), then the designer's payoff under the optimal lottery is equal to his expected payoff under the optimal all-pay auction.

Original languageEnglish
Pages (from-to)48-60
Number of pages13
JournalEconomics and Politics
Volume25
Issue number1
DOIs
StatePublished - Mar 2013

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