Expropriation auctions: Predation contests and wallet games

A predation contest is an all-pay winner-take-all property reassignment game where each player bids to acquire the assets of all participants net of total bidding expenditures. It involves lower symmetric monotone equilibrium bidding in the ascending bid, first- and second-price auction formats than its winner-pay counterpart, the wallet game. When frictions are absent in these two types of expropriation auctions, the equilibrium bidders’ payoff is identical to that in standard single-object independent private value auctions, extending the payoff equivalence result to this wider class of almost-common-value auctions.