I consider repeated games with local monitoring: each player observes his neighbors’ moves only. Hence, monitoring is private and imperfect. Communication is private: each player can send different (costless) messages to different players. The solution concept is perfect Bayesian equilibrium....

We consider a two-player all-pay auction with symmetric independent private values that are uniformly distributed. The designer chooses the size of a head start that is given to one of the players. The designer’s objective is to maximize a convex combination of the expected highest effort and...

In this paper we relax the Colonel Blotto game assumption that for a given battle the player who allocates the higher measure of resources wins that battle. We assume that for a given battle, the Colonel who allocates the higher measure of resources is more likely to win. We have a simpler model...

We apply an indirect evolutionary approach to players’ perceived prize valuations in contests. Evolution in finite populations leads to preferences that overstate the prize’s material value and induce overexpenditure. We establish an equivalence between evolutionarily stable strategies and...

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...

We examine a multi-dimensional incomplete information Colonel Blotto game in which each player’s n-tuple of battlefield valuations is drawn from a common n-variate joint distribution function that is uniform on the non-negative orthant of the surface of a sphere.

We consider preference evolution in a class of conflict models with finite populations. We show that whereas aggregate conflict effort is always the same in evolutionary equilibrium, larger populations have greater individual subjective costs of conflict effort.

We consider a multi-winner nested elimination contest in which losers are sequentially eliminated to attain the set of winners. This is a variant of a widely used mechanism introduced by Clark and Riis (1996) that allows one to select the winners sequentially. We show that the current mechanism...

In this paper, we make use of a unique dataset collected at the central train station of the city of Kiel, Germany. Group tickets are used by individual proposers looking for co-travelers to share the ride with shortly before the train departure. The shared ride is offered for a fixed price. We...

We analyze equilibria of two-player contests where players have intention-based preferences. We find that players invest more effort compared to the case with selfish preferences and are even willing to exert effort when the monetary value of the prize converges to zero. As a consequence,...