Please use this identifier to cite or link to this item: https://hdl.handle.net/10419/162411 
Year of Publication: 
2016
Series/Report no.: 
Working Paper No. 186
Version Description: 
Revised version, September 2016
Publisher: 
University of Zurich, Department of Economics, Zurich
Abstract: 
This paper considers all-pay contests in which the relationship between bids and allocation 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 payoff 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.
Subjects: 
Contests
increasing returns
mixed-strategy Nash equilibrium
robustness of the all-pay auction
payoff equivalence
revenue equivalence
JEL: 
C72
D45
D72
L12
Persistent Identifier of the first edition: 
Document Type: 
Working Paper

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