This paper studies a large class of imperfectly discriminating contests, referred to as elastic contests, that induce players to either overbid a standing bid or to abstain from bidding altogether. Many common forms of contest are elastic. In any equilibrium of an elastic contest, there is...

Optimal rank-order tournaments have traditionally been studied using a first-order approach. The present analysis relies instead on the construction of an "upper envelope" over all incentive compatibility conditions. lt turns out that the first-order approach is not innocuous. For example, in...

Optimal rank-order tournaments have traditionally been studied using a first-order approach. The present analysis relies instead on the construction of an "upper envelope" over all incentive compatibility conditions. It turns out that the first-order approach is not innocuous. For example, in...

In a canonical model of military conflict, victory and defeat depend stochastically on the difference of resources deployed by the conflict parties. The present paper offers a comprehensive analysis of that model. The unique Nash equilibrium reflects either (i) peace, (ii) submission, (iii)...

This paper examines multi-battle contests whose extensive form can be represented in terms of a finite state machine. We start by showing that any contest that satisfies our assumptions decomposes into two phases, a principal phase (in which states cannot be revisited) and a concluding...

We consider a class of incomplete-information Colonel Blotto games in which N ≥ 2 agents are engaged in (N + 1) battlefields. An agent's vector of battlefield valuations is drawn from a generalized sphere in Lp-space. We identify a Bayes-Nash equilibrium in which any agent's resource...