Common-value contests with asymmetric information

摘要

We consider two-player, perfectly discriminatory, common-value contests (or all-pay auctions), in which one player knows the value of the contested object with certainty, and the other knows only its prior distribution. We show, among other things, that in equilibrium the players win with equal probability. This contrasts with a large class of imperfectly discriminatory contests in which the uninformed player wins with a strictly greater probability than the informed player.