I study a two-period model of conflict with two combatants and a third party who is an ally of one of the combatants. The third party is fully informed about the type of her ally but not about the type of her ally's enemy. There is a signaling game between the third party and her ally's enemy...

I present a two-player nested contest which is a convex combination of two widely studied contests: the Tullock (lottery) contest and the all-pay auction. A Nash equilibrium exists for all parameters of the nested contest. If and only if the contest is sufficiently asymmetric, then there is an...

This paper studies sabotage in a contest with non-identical players. Unlike previous papers, we consider sabotage in an elimination contest and allow contestants to sabotage a potential or future rival. It turns out that for a certain partition of players there is a pure-strategy equilibrium in...

A standard result in contests is that a higher-ability player has a higher probability of winning the prize than a lower-ability player. Put differently, a stronger player has an advantage over a weaker player in a contest. There are very few exceptions to this standard result. I consider a...

This paper reviews the relatively small literature on sabotage in contests. It looks at both the formal game-theoretic literature and the empirical and experimental literatures. The treatment is intended to be intuitive with minimal use of technical jargon.

I study a sequential-move public goods game based on the notion that leadership comes with an obligation; conscientious leadership. Provision by the leader of an amount of the public good below a minimum imposes a psychological cost on the follower which increases his unit cost of contribution....

I consider a contest in which the quantity of output is rewarded and another in which the quality of output is rewarded. The output in the quality contest plays a dual role. It counts in the quality contest but it is also converted into quantity-equivalent output to obtain total output in the...

There are several empirical studies of ex post analysis of citations in academia. There is no ex ante analysis of citations. I consider a game-theoretic model of a contest between scholars on the basis of two widely-used measures of citations (i.e., the ℎ-index and total citation count) and...

I consider a model in which an asset owner must decide how much to invest in his asset mindful of the fact that an encroacher's valuation of the asset is increasing in the asset owner's investment. Due to incomplete property rights, the encroacher and asset owner engage in a contest over the...