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This paper evaluates direct and structural discrimination as a means of increasing efforts in the most widely studied contests. We establish that a designer who maximizes efforts subject to a balanced-budget constraint prefers dual discrimination, namely, change of the contestants' prize valuations as well as bias of the impact of their efforts. Optimal twofold discrimination is often superior to any single mode of discrimination under any logit CSF. Our main result establishes that, surprisingly, from the designerś point of view, dual discrimination can yield the maximal possible efforts when it is applied to the prototypical simple logit CSF. In this case it yields almost the highest valuation of the contested prize.

Government intervention often gives rise to contests and the government can influence their outcome by choosing their type. We consider a contest with two interest groups: one that is governed by a central planner and one that is not. Rent dissipation is compared under two well-known contest success functions: the generalized logit and the all-pay auction. We also consider the case in which the government can limit the size of the non-governed interest group in order to determine the scope of rent dissipation, with the goal of either increasing the rent obtained by the government or reducing the wasted resources invested in the contest.

This article considers an asymmetric contest with incomplete information. There are two types of players: informed and uninformed. Each player has a different ability to translate effort into performance in terms of the contest success function. While one player's type is known to both players, the other is private information and known only to the player himself. We compare the Bayesian Nash equilibrium outcome of a one-sided private information contest to the Nash equilibrium with no private information, in which both players know the type of the other player. We show conditions under which uncertainty increases the investment of the uninformed player and the rent dissipation of the contest, while decreasing the expected net payoff of the informed player. In addition, we consider conditions under which the informed player - before knowing his own type - prefers that the uninformed player knows his type. Moreover, we show conditions for the existence/non-existence of equilibrium in a two-stage contest in which the informed player declares his type (or does not declare) in the first stage and in the second stage the two players play according to the information available to them.

Government intervention often gives rise to contests and the government can influence their outcome by choosing their type. We consider a contest with two interest groups: one that is governed by a central planner and one that is not. Rent dissipation is compared under two well-known contest success functions: the generalized logit and the all-pay auction. We also consider the case in which the government can limit the size of the non-governed interest group in order to determine the scope of rent dissipation, with the goal of either increasing the rent obtained by the government or reducing the wasted resources invested in the contest.

In a contest group - specific public goods we consider the effect that managing an interest group has on the rent dissipation and the total expected payoffs of the contest. While in the first group, there is a central planner determining its members' expenditure in the contest, in the second group there are two different possibilities: either all the members are governed by a central planner or they aren't. We consider both types of contests: an all pay auction and a Logit contest success function. We show that while governing an interest group decreases free-riding, it may as well decrease the rent dissipation; at the same time the expected payoffs from the groups may also decrease.

We consider a two group contest over a group specific public good where each member of a group has a different benefit from the good. Our model can be interpreted in two ways: Each of the players has a non-linear investment cost in the contest, or alternatively, the returns to effort are decreasing as reflected in the contest success function. In the first part of the paper we show conditions under which freeriding decreases and consider the different properties of the equilibrium. In the second part of the paper we develop the properties of the optimal formation of the group and its affect on the equilibrium outcome.