This paper considers rent-seeking games in which a small percentage change in a player's bid has a large percentage impact on her odds of winning, i.e., on the ratio of her respective probabilities of winning and losing. An example is the Tullock contest with a high R. The analysis provides a...

Efficiently growing a group or firm often requires integration of individuals from lower-performing entities. We explore the effectiveness of two policies intended to facilitate such integration, using a laboratory experiment that models production as a coordination game with Pareto-ranked...

The Hotelling game of pure location allows interpretations in spatial competition, political theory, and professional forecasting. In this paper, the doubly symmetric mixed-strategy equilibrium for n ≥ 4 firms is characterized as the solution of a well-behaved boundary value problem. The...

The first step in solving the problem of corruption lies in diagnosing its root causes and determining the underlying factors. One of the most important facilitators of corrupt transactions is intermediaries who make corrupt dealings less risky, thereby increasing corruption. Even worse, there...

At the time of writing, the Riemann Hypothesis (RH) is one of the major unsolved problems in pure mathematics. In this note, a parameterized family of non-cooperative games is constructed with the property that, if RH holds true, then any game in this family admits a unique Nash equilibrium.

We study how the willingness to enter long-term bilateral relationships affects cooperation even when parties have little information about each other, ex ante, and cooperation is otherwise unenforceable. We experimentally investigate a finitely-repeated Prisoner's Dilemma, allowing players to...

Szidarovszky and Okuguchi (Games and Economic Behavior, 1997) have provided useful conditions for the existence of a unique pure-strategy Nash equilibrium in rent-seeking games of complete information. In this paper, we generalize their results to contests with incomplete informa tion. Two...

Higher-dimensional symmetric games become of more and more importance for applied micro- and macroeconomic research. Standard approaches to uniqueness of equilibria have the drawback that they are restrictive or not easy to evaluate analytically. In this paper I provide some general but...

Efficient growth often requires the integration of individuals from lower-performing groups, firms, or societies into higher-performing ones. Such integration may be difficult without facilitating interventions or restrictions. We explore, using a laboratory experiment, the effectiveness of two...

This paper examines whether and how cheap talk communication can facilitate within-group coordination when two unequal sized groups compete for a prize that is shared equally among members of the winning group, regardless of their (costly) contributions to the group's success. We find that...