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...

The sum of a supermodular function, assumed nondecreasing in the choice variable, and of a 'concavely supermodularizable' function, assumed nonincreasing in the parameter variable, satisfies the Milgrom-Shannon (1994, Monotone comparative statics, Econometrica 62, 157-180) single crossing...

Biconcavity is a simple condition on inverse demand that corresponds to the ordinary concept of concavity after simultaneous parameterized transformations of price and quantity. The notion is employed here in the framework of the homogeneous-good Cournot model with potentially heterogeneous...

I present a game-theoretic model where economic competition and attention competition are interdependent. On the one hand the effort to attract consumer attention depends on the value of attention to the firm which depends on the grade of price competition among all perceived firms. On the other...

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...

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...

Some labor markets have recently developed formal signaling mechanisms, e.g. the signaling for interviews in the job market for new Ph.D. economists. We evaluate the effect of such mechanisms on two-sided matching markets by considering a game of incomplete information between firms and workers....

Schott et al. (2007) have shown that the “tragedy of the commons” can be overcome when individuals share their output equally in groups of optimal size and there is no communication. In this paper we investigate the impact of introducing communication groups that may or may not be linked to...

We modify the provision point mechanism by introducing reward money, which is distributed among the contributors in proportion to their contributions only when the provision point is not reached. In equilibrium, the provision point is always reached as competition for reward money and preference...

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...