infonet-economy

Considered are imperfectly discriminating contests in which players may possess private information about the primitives of the confiict, such as the contest technology, valuations of the prize, cost functions, and budget constraints. We find general conditions under which a given contest of this sort admits a unique pure-strategy Nash equilibrium. In particular, provided that all budgets are positive, existence requires only the usual concavity assumptions. Information structures that satisfy our conditions for uniqueness include independent private valuations, correlated private values, pure common values, and examples of interdependent valuations. The results allow dealing with inactive types, asymmetric equilibria, population uncertainty, and the possibility of resale. It is also shown that any active contestant ends up with a positive net rent.