This paper studies a large class of imperfectly discriminating contests, referred to as elastic contests, that induce players to either overbid a standing bid or to abstain from bidding altogether. Many common forms of contest are elastic. In any equilibrium of an elastic contest, there is...

We characterize the equilibrium set of the n-player Hirshleifer contest with homogeneous valuations. A symmetric equilibrium always exists. It necessarily corresponds to multilateral peace for sufficient noise and uses finite-support randomized strategies otherwise. Asymmetric equilibria are...

While the game-theoretic analysis of conflict is often based upon the assumption of multiplicative noise, additive noise such as assumed by Hirshleifer (1989) may be equally plausible depending on the application. In this paper, we examine the equilibrium set of the n-player difference-form...

In a deterministic contest or all-pay auction, all rents are dissipated when information is complete and contestants are identical. As one contestant becomes “stronger”, that is, values the prize more, total expenditures are known to decrease monotonically. Thus, asymmetry among contestants...

The ratio of within-group to between-group fighting is shown to be unrealistically high for the collective rent seeking model when agents exert two efforts i.e. within-group and between-group efforts. The ratio is more realistic for the production and conflict model. Six economics examples...

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...

Any symmetric mixed-strategy equilibrium in a Tullock contest with intermediate values of the decisiveness parameter ("2 R ∞") has countably infinitely many mass points. All probability weight is concentrated on those mass points, which have the zero bid as their sole point of accumulation....

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...

We allow a contest organizer to bias a contest in a discriminatory way, that is, she can favor specific contestants through the choice of contest success functions in order to maximize total equilibrium effort (resp. revenue). The scope for revenue enhancement through biasing is analyzed and...

A lack of sufficient diversification in research strategies has been identified as an important problem for delegated research. We show that this problem can be solved by local competition (such as bribery, lobbying, rent seeking, competition at the patent office) among players who apply the...