It is shown that the n-player lottery contest admits a best-response potential (Voorneveld, 2000, Economics Letters). This is true also when the contest technology reflects the possibility of a draw. The result implies, in particular, the existence of a non-trivial two-player zero-sum game that...

This paper examines multi-battle contests whose extensive form can be represented in terms of a finite state machine. We start by showing that any contest that satisfies our assumptions decomposes into two phases, a principal phase (in which states cannot be revisited) and a concluding...

We introduce a simple two-stage game of endogenous network formation and information sharing for reasoning about the optimal design of social networks like Facebook or Google. We distinguish between unilateral and bilateral connections and between targeted and collective information sharing....

Second price allpay auctions (wars of attritions) have an evolutionarily stable equilibrium in pure strategies if valuations are private information. I show that for any level of uncertainty there exists a pure deviation strategy close to the equilibrium strategy such that for some valuations...

It is a very well-known result that in terms of evolutionary stability the long-run outcome of a Cournot oligopoly market with finitely many firms approaches the perfectly competitive Walrasian market outcome (Vega-Redondo, 1997). However, in this paper we show that an asymmetric structure in...

This paper studies the dynamic construction of a blockchain by competitive miners. In contrast to the literature, we assume a finite time horizon. Moreover, miners are rewarded for blocks that eventually become part of the longest chain. It is shown that popular mining strategies such as...

We consider a simple contest game with draws where with some probability none of the contestants is selected as winner. If such an outcome occurs, then the contest is repeated in the next period unless either one of the contestants wins the prize or until a final last period is reached. Allowing...

In this paper we introduce a stochastic network formation model where agents choose both actions and links. Neighbors in the network benefit from each other's action levels through local complementarities and there exists a global interaction effect reflecting a strategic substitutability in...

The paper studies a dynamic communication game in the presence of adverse selection and career concerns. A forecaster of privately known competence, who cares about his reputation, chooses the timing of the forecast regarding the outcome of some future event. We find that in all equilibria in a...

We study communication in a two-player coordination game with Pareto-ranked equilibria. Prior research demonstrates that efficient coordination is difficult without communication but obtains regularly with (mandatory) costless pre-play messages. In a laboratory experiment, we modify...