Simple Equilibria in General Contests

We show how symmetric equilibria emerge in general two-player contests in which skill and effort are combined to produce output according to a general production technology and players have skills drawn from different distributions. The model includes the Tullock (1980) and Lazear and Rosen (1981) models as special cases. Our paper provides intuition regarding how the contest components interact to determine the incentive to exert effort and sheds new light on classic comparative statics results. In particular, we show that more heterogeneity can increase equilibrium effort.An earlier working paper version of this paper was circulated under the title “A General Framework for Studying Contests”.