On the Number of Contestants and Equilibrium Individual Effort

This paper shows that in a contest with the "Tullock" forms of contest success function, an increase in the number of contestants always reduces individual effort. However, when the outcome of the contest is governed by a noisy function of effort, then individual effort could either increase or decrease following an increase in the number of contestants, depending on whether the density function of the shock is upward or downward sloping.