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Many innovative products are designed to satisfy the demand of specific target consumers; thus, the innovators will inevitably compete with each other in the product market. We investigate how a profit-maximizing principal should properly allocate her limited resources to support the innovations of multiple potentially competing innovators. We find that, as the available resources increase, the optimal diversification of investment may first increase and then decrease. This interesting nonmonotone pattern is driven by a trade-off between the risk of innovation failure and rent dissipation because of competition. Using this framework, we also analyze a nonprofit principal seeking to maximize the total number of successful innovations, the probability of at least one innovator succeeding, consumer surplus, and total social welfare. A nonprofit principal tends to invest more diversely compared with a for-profit counterpart. This paper was accepted by Sridhar Tayur, entrepreneurship and innovation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We study the econometrics of an asymmetric Tullock contest model with incomplete information. Identification results are established for parameters in the asymmetric contest success function and for the quantile functions of players' private costs. We propose the corresponding estimators, derive the asymptotic properties, and demonstrate their good finite sample performances by simulation. We also propose an easy‐to‐implement parametric estimation method that can incorporate contest‐specific covariates. Our method is used to study U.S. House of Representatives elections. We quantify the incumbency advantages and conduct policy experiments to evaluate how imposing a term limit or launching campaign finance reforms affects incumbency advantage. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]