This paper considers the effect of status or relative income on work effort, combining experimental evidence from a gift-exchange game with the analysis of multi-country ISSP survey data. We find a consistent negative effect of others' incomes on individual effort in both datasets. The...

Higher income is associated with greater well-being, but do income gains and losses impact on well-being differently? Loss aversion, whereby losses loom larger than gains, is typically examined with relation to decisions about anticipated outcomes. Here, using subjective well-being data from...

The same contestants often meet repeatedly in contests. Behavior in a contest potentially provides information with regard to one's type and can therefore influence the behavior of the opponents in later contests. This paper shows that if effort is observable, this can induce a ratchet effect in...

Perfectly discriminating contests (or all pay auction) are widely used as a model of situations where individuals devote resources to win some prize. In reality such contests are often preceded by investments of the contestants into their ability to fight in the contest. This paper studies a two...

This paper models the trade-off between production and appropriation in the presence of simultaneous inter- and intra-group conflicts. The model exhibits a 'group cohesion effect': if the contest between the groups becomes more decisive, or contractual incompleteness between groups becomes more...

This paper considers incentives for information acquisition ahead of conflicts. We characterize the (unique) equilibrium of the all-pay auction between two players with one-sided asymmetric information. The type of one player is common knowledge. The type of the other player is drawn from a...

This paper extends the axiomatic characterization of contest success functions of Skaperdas (1996) and Clark and Riis (1998) to contests between groups. – Contest ; conflict ; axiom ; group

Lobbyists choose what to lobby for. If they can precommit to certain policy proposals, their choice will have an influence on the behavior of opposing lobbyists. Hence lobbyists have an incentive to moderate their policy proposals in order to reduce the intensity of the lobbying contest. This...