Lotteries vs. All-Pay Auctions in Fair and Biased Contests The form of contests for a single fixed prize can be determined by a designer who maximizes the contestants’ efforts. This paper establishes that, under common knowledge of the two asymmetric contestants’ prize valuations, a fair Tullock-type endogenously determined lottery is always superior to an all-pay-auction; it yields larger expe...

We consider a firm that produces multiple variants of a product. Products are assembled using a combination of common and dedicated components. We characterize the optimal assortment and derive the optimal inventory levels for the common and dedicated components under various bill-ofmaterial configurations. We investigate the effect of commonality on product variety and compare its benefits und...