Reserve prices in all-pay auctions with complete information

We introduce reserve prices in the literature concerning all-pay auctions with complete information, and reconsider the case for the so-called Exclusion Principle (namely, the fact that the seller may find it in her best interest to exclude the bidders with the largest willingness to pay for the prize). We show that a version of it extends to our setting. However, we also show that the Exclusion Principle: (a) does not apply if the reserve price is large enough; (b) does not extend if the seller regards bidders' valuations as identically independently distributed according to a monotonic hazard rate. Preliminary results for the case of independent ex-ante asymmetric bidders suggest that the case for it in settings with positive reserve prices is actually tenuous. (C) 2016 University of Venice. Published by Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.