Agent Failures in All-Pay Auctions

All-pay auctions, a common mechanism for various human and agent interactions, suffers (like many other mechanisms) from the possibility of players' failure to participate in the auction. The authors model such failures and fully characterize equilibrium for this class of games, presenting a symmetric equilibrium and showing that under some conditions the equilibrium is unique. They also reveal various properties of the equilibrium, such as the lack of influence of the most-likely-to-participate player on the behavior of the other players. The authors perform this analysis with two scenarios: the sum-profit model, in which the auctioneer obtains the sum of all submitted bids, and the max-profit model of crowdsourcing contests, in which the auctioneer can only use the best submissions and thus obtains only the winning bid. Finally, the authors examine various methods of influencing the probability of participation such as the effects of misreporting one's own probability of participating and how influencing another player's participation chances changes a player's strategy.