A symmetric two-player all-pay contest with correlated information

•We study a two-player all-pay auction with binary types and correlated information structures.•We characterize both monotonic and non-monotonic symmetric Bayesian Nash equilibria for the all-pay auction game.•The symmetric equilibrium is monotonic if the types are mildly positively/negatively correlated and is otherwise non-monotonic.•We employ parametric distributions to illustrate the symmetric equilibrium.

We construct both monotonic and non-monotonic symmetric Bayesian Nash equilibria for a two-player all-pay contest with binary types and correlated information structures. We also employ a class of parametric distributions to illustrate our equilibrium construction explicitly and to derive some comparative statics results.