Title: Agent Failures in All-Pay Auctions,
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.