When investments are specific to a relationship and contracting possibilities are incomplete, the efficiency of a joint venture may be severely impaired by ex-post opportunistic and hold-up type behavior. How is the logic of this argument affected by inequity aversion? In this paper I show that...

When investments are specific to a relationship and contracting possibilities are incomplete, the efficiency of a joint venture may be severely impaired by ex-post opportunistic and hold-up type behavior. How is the logic of this argument affected by inequity aversion? In this paper I show that...

Szidarovszky and Okuguchi (Games and Economic Behavior, 1997) have provided useful conditions for the existence of a unique pure-strategy Nash equilibrium in rent-seeking games of complete information. In this paper, we generalize their results to contests with incomplete informa tion. Two...

This paper considers all-pay contests in which the relationship between bids and allocation reflects a small amount of noise. Prior work had focused on one particular equilibrium. However, there may be other equilibria. To address this issue, we introduce a new and intuitive measure for the...

It is shown that the n-player lottery contest admits a best-response potential (Voorneveld, 2000, Economics Letters). This is true also when the contest technology reflects the possibility of a draw. The result implies, in particular, the existence of a nontrivial example of a strictly...

It is shown that the equilibrium in the asymmetric Tullock contest is unique for parameter values r È 2. This allows proving a revenue ranking result saying that a revenue-maximizing designer capable of biasing the contest always prefers a contest technology with higher accuracy.

The symmetric two-player Hirshleifer (1989) contest is shown to admit a unique equilibrium. The support of the equilibrium strategy is finite and includes, in particular, the zero expenditure level. We also establish a lower bound for the cardinality of the support and an upper bound for the...

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...

In the class of smooth non-cooperative games, exact potential games and weighted potential games are known to admit a convenient characterization in terms of cross-derivatives (Monderer and Shapley, 1996a). However, no analogous characterization is known for ordinal potential games. The present...

We consider a class of incomplete-information Colonel Blotto games in which N Ï 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 allocation...