Additive multi-effort contests

Contests with productive effort

I consider competitions in which, conditional on winning or losing, the effort exerted by a competitor does not necessarily decrease his payoff. This happens, for example, in competitions for promotions in which workers are intrinsically motivated, and in research and development races in which better performance implies a higher payoff from winning. I characterize players’ equilibrium payoffs ...

Reduced prizes and increased effort in contests

We study the general class of two-player public-policy contests and specify the asymmetry condition under which a more restrained government intervention that reduces the contestants’ prizes has the "perverse" effect of increasing their aggregate lobbying efforts.

Effort and Performance in Public-policy Contests

Government intervention often gives rise to contests in which the possible ‘prizes’ are determined by the existing status-quo and some new publicpolicy proposal . In this paper we study the general class of such two-player public-policy contests and examine the effect of a change in the proposed policy, a change that may affect the payoffs of the two contestants, on their effort and performance...

All-Pay Contests with Productive Effort

I consider competitions in which, conditional on winning or losing, the effort exerted by a competitor does not necessarily decrease his payoff. This happens, for example, in competitions for promotions in which workers are intrinsically motivated, and in research and development races in which better performance implies a higher payoff from winning. I characterize players’ equilibrium payoffs ...

Contests with multi-tasking