In a multi-stage contest known as a two-player race, players display two fundamental behaviors: (1) the laggard will make a last stand in order to avoid the cost of losing; and (2) the player who is ahead will defend his lead if it is threatened. Last stand behavior, in particular, contrasts...

We introduce three extensions of the Hirshleifer–Skaperdas conflict game to study experimentally the effects of post-conflict behavior and repeated interaction on the allocation of effort between production and appropriation. Without repeated interaction, destruction of resources by defeated...

The generic alliance game considers players in an alliance who fight against an external enemy. After victory, the alliance may break up, and its members may fight against each other over the spoils of the victory. Our experimental analysis of this game shows: In-group solidarity vanishes after...

This paper analyzes the ability of group members to cooperate in rent-seeking activities in a context of between-group competition. For this purpose, we develop an infinitely repeated rent-seeking game between two groups of different size. We first investigate Nash reversion strategies to...

The election of extreme political leaders is often associated with changes in political institutions. This paper studies these phenomena through a model in which the median voter elects a leader anticipating that he will impose institutional constraints—such as constitutional amendments,...

We use a laboratory experiment to study bargaining with random implementation. We modify the standard Nash demand game so that incompatible demands do not necessarily lead to the disagreement outcome. Rather, with exogenous probability q, one bargainer receives his/her demand, with the other...

We study the role of commitment as a source of strategic power in a non-cooperative bargaining game. Two impatient players bargain about the division of a shrinking surplus under a standard bargaining protocol in discrete time with constant recognition probabilities. Before bargaining, a player...

Most real-life bargaining is resolved gradually. During this process parties reach intermediate agreements. These intermediate agreements serve as disagreement points in subsequent rounds. We identify robustness criteria which are satisfied by three prominent bargaining solutions, the Nash,...

Most legislatures require the consent of only a simple majority to pass a proposal, so why donʼt legislative outcomes favor only a bare majority? We show that compromise can be achieved if legislators are neither too impatient nor too patient, and initial allocations are “not too unequal”....

We consider the problem of adjudicating conflicting claims, and characterize the family of rules satisfying four standard invariance requirements, homogeneity, two composition properties, and consistency. It takes as point of departure the characterization of the family of two-claimant rules...