Abstract
I analyze the optimal favoritism in a complete-information all-pay contest with two players, whose costs of effort are weakly convex. The contest designer could favor or harm some contestants using one of two instruments: head starts and handicaps. I find that any given player’s effort distribution is ranked in the sense of first-order stochastic dominance according to how (ex post) symmetric the players are in terms of competitiveness. Consequently, as long as the designer values effort from both contestants, “leveling the playing field” is optimal regardless of which instrument is used.
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