We study talent-based contests with endogenous entry where an agent’s talent or ability purely determines the outcome. Entry is costly but worthwhile if there is a sufficient probability of winning the prize. Entrants differ in ability, which is private information. The distribution from which a player’s ability is drawn is common knowledge. We restrict attention to Bayesian Nash equilibria in cautiously rationalizable strategies.

This paper offers a much simplified, yet at the same time, a lot more general model that not only reproduces the major insights emerging from the recent literature of trade with heterogeneous firms, yet at the same time goes much beyond. The paper helps streamline the key driving force behind the established insights while teasing out some of the unnecessary and complicating details in the existing literature. We show that the key driving force is that trade reallocates resources from less productive firms to more productive firms at the margin.

The Silk Road is often idealized, conjuring up romantic visions of caravans laded with exotic silks and aromatic spices. The glamorous version of the Silk Road persists because at least one unsavory aspect of the trade, slavery, has received little scholarly attention. In this lecture, Professor Jonathan Skaff presents a rare glimpse of the eastern slave trade from Chinese-language contracts and travel permits that have survived at the Silk Road oasis city of Turfan in modern Xinjiang.

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