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 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,...

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 propose a simple non-cooperative game model in which two fragmented teams compete to increase their performance. The theoretical framework is based on the theory of conflict. We show that, depending on the value of a parameter in the model, the power of the competing teams may be expressed as...

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 provide a sufficient condition under which an uninformed principal can infer any information that is common knowledge among two experts, regardless of the structure of the parties’ beliefs. The condition requires that the bias of each expert is less than the radius of the smallest ball...

We analyze the effect of banking crises on terrorist activity for 146 countries between 1972 and 2006. We show that banking crises lead to a subsequent increase in terrorism. This effect is only relevant in less developed economies.

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.