This paper studies the attack-and-defence game between a web user and a whole set of players over this user's ‘valuable secrets.' The number and type of these valuable secrets are the user's private information. Attempts to tap information as well as privacy protection are costly. The...

The provision of public goods by any government generally requires a significant amount of financial resources. Yet, the inherent characteristics of public goods imply that individuals who refuse to contribute financially cannot easily be excluded from the benefits provided by public goods. This...

The tug-of-war between single players is known to have a non-cooperative Markov-perfect equilibrium in which both players expend zero efforts and neither player drives the Markov process to one of the terminal states. We show that these peaceful outcomes vanish if the single players are replaced...

We consider two players' choice about the formation of an alliance ahead of conflict in a framework with incomplete information about the strength of co-players. When deciding on alliance formation, players anticipate the self-selection of other players and the informational value of own and...

We examine an endogenous, sunk budget extension of Myerson's (1993) two-candidate model of political competition in which candidates simultaneously allocate an exogenous level of a use-it-or-lose-it persuasive advertising resource across a homogeneous electorate of unit measure. We completely...

This paper surveys some of the strategic aspects that emerge if players fight in an alliance against an enemy. The survey includes the free-rider problem and the hold-up problem that emerges in the baseline model, the role of supermodularity in alliance members' effort contributions, the role of...

When politicians negotiate in international climate conventions they may suffer from incomplete information about each other's preferences about reaching an agreement. As is known, this may cause failure to reach an efficient cooperative agreement. We study the role of the clean development...

Clustering and lack of sufficient diversification in research strategies has been identified as an important problem for delegated research as it takes place in design contests by Erat and Krishnan (2012). We show that this problem can be solved by local competition (such as bribery, lobbying or...

We study the role of an imbalance in fighting strengths when players bargain in the shadow of conflict. Our experimental results suggest: In a simple bargaining game with an exogenous mediation proposal, the likelihood of conflict is independent of the balance of power. If bargaining involves...

We study a dynamic multi-stage contest that resolves in each stage only with a given probability. Assuming that there is unobservable heterogeneity in intrinsic motivations we derive properties of the equilibrium efforts across the different stages. Whereas in the corresponding complete...