A simple auction-theoretic framework is used to examine symmetric litigation environments where the legal ownership of a disputed asset is unknown to the court. The court observes only the quality of the case presented by each party, and awards the asset to the party presenting the best case....

This paper reconsiders Tullock's analysis of rent seeking and wasteful overdissipation. The purpose of this paper is to point outthat even though his original analysis of overdissipation is technically flawed, the definition of overdissipation can bemodified to explain instances in which...

The Babylonian bridal auction, described by Herodotus, is regarded as one of the earliest uses of an auction in history. Yet, to our knowledge, the literature lacks a formal equilibrium analysis of this auction. We provide such an analysis for the twoplayer case with complete and incompete...

This paper presents a unified framework for characterizing symmetric equilibrium in simultaneous move, two-player, rank-order contests with complete information, in which each player's strategy generates direct or indirect affine spillover effects that depend on the rank-order of her decision...

We study career choice when competition for promotion is a contest. A more meritocratic profession always succeeds in attracting the highest ability types, whereas a profession with superior promotion benefits attracts high types only if the hazard rate of the noise in performance evaluation is...

We study situations where a new entrant with privately known talent competes with an incumbent whose talent is common knowledge. Competition takes the form of a rank-order tournament. Prior to the competition, the newbie can "show off," i.e., send a talent revealing costly signal. We find that...