# Agent Failures in All-Pay Auctions

## TL;DR

This paper models and characterizes equilibrium in all-pay auctions considering player failures, revealing properties of the equilibrium and analyzing influence strategies in sum-profit and max-profit scenarios.

## Contribution

It provides a full equilibrium characterization for all-pay auctions with player failures, including symmetric and unique equilibria under certain conditions.

## Key findings

- Equilibrium properties show the least-likely-to-participate player does not influence others.
- Symmetric equilibrium exists and can be unique under specific conditions.
- Strategies are affected by misreporting and influencing other players' participation probabilities.

## Abstract

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. We model such failures, and fully characterize equilibrium for this class of games, we present a symmetric equilibrium and show that under some conditions the equilibrium is unique. We 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. We perform this analysis with two scenarios: the sum-profit model, where the auctioneer obtains the sum of all submitted bids, and the max-profit model of crowdsourcing contests, where the auctioneer can only use the best submissions and thus obtains only the winning bid. Furthermore, we 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 the player's strategy.