This study analyzes a group contest in which one group (defenders) follows a weakest link whereas the other group (attackers) follows a best-shot impact function. We fully characterize the equilibria and show that with symmetric valuation the equilibrium is unique up to the permutation of the...

Contests are ubiquitous in economic and political settings. Contest designers often use tools to make a contest among asymmetric contestants more even, in order to either elicit higher effort levels, or for ethical reasons. Handicapping - in which stronger participants are a priori weakened - is...

We investigate whether a pure framing has any effect on the decisions made in a dictator game. We run a between subject dictator game with a giving and a taking frame whilst keeping the strategy space the same. Complying with the literature we find no overall difference in the amount allocated...

We study experimentally the effects of cost structure and prize allocation rules on the performance of rent-seeking contests. Most previous studies use a lottery prize rule and linear cost, and find both overbidding relative to the Nash equilibrium prediction and significant variation of...

We investigate the consequences of a pure income effect on the altruistic behavior of donors. Inequality aversion theories predict either no effect or a decrease in giving, whereas impure altruism theory predicts an increase in giving with an increase in the common income of donor and receiver....

A contest is a situation in which individuals expend resources in order to win valuable prize(s). `Sabotage' is a deliberate, and often costly and illegal, act of damaging a rival's likelihood of winning the contest. It is done by exerting resources to negatively influence the effectiveness of a...