The formation of an alliance in conflict situations is known to suffer from a collective action problem and from the potential of internal conflict. We show that budget constraints of an intermediate size can overcome this strong disadvantage and explain the formation of alliances.

This paper examines the effect of inefficient redistribution in Myerson’s (1993) model of redistributive politics. Regardless of the absolute levels of the efficiency of political parties’ transfers to different voter segments, parties have incentive to (stochastically) shift resources away...

This article examines behavior in the two-player, constant-sum Colonel Blotto game with asymmetric resources in which players maximize the expected number of battlefields won. The experimental results support all major theoretical predictions. In the auction treatment, where winning a...

This paper utilizes a simple model of redistributive politics with voter abstention to analyze the impact of nonpartisan ‘get-out-the-vote’ efforts on policy outcomes. Although such efforts are often promoted on the grounds that they provide the social benefit of increasing participation in...

In 2005, the Democratic National Committee adopted the 50-state strategy in lieu of the strategy of focusing solely on battleground states. The rationale given for this move is that campaign expenditures are durable outlays that impact both current and future campaigns. This paper investigates...

We study an all-pay contest with multiple identical prizes (lifeboat seats). Prizes are partitioned into subsets of prizes (lifeboats). Players play a two-stage game. First, each player chooses an element of the partition (a lifeboat). Then each player competes for a prize in the subset chosen...

We characterize the unique Markov perfect equilibrium of a tug-of-war without exogenous noise, in which players have the opportunity to engage in a sequence of battles in an attempt to win the war. Each battle is an all-pay auction in which the player expending the greater resources wins. In...

We study equilibrium in a multistage race in which players compete in a sequence of simultaneous move component contests. Players may win a prize for winning each component contest, as well as a prize for winning the overall race. Each component contest is an all-pay auction with complete...

This article examines behavior in the two-player, constant-sum Colonel Blotto game with asymmetric resources in which players maximize the expected number of battlefields won. The experimental results support all major theoretical predictions. In the auction treatment, where winning a...

This article investigates the impact of societal structure on behavior in competitions that can be modeled as all-pay auctions with identity-dependent externalities. The consideration of identity-dependent externalities, which naturally arise in the most common applications of all-pay auctions,...