It is found that the “Theory of Moves” is adequate in a Cold War scenario, with functionally equal participants, such as the Cuban Missile Crisis. The destabilization of normal incentive systems, under power and information asymmetry, is what prevents an equilibrium from being reached, as...

This study compares contests with exogenous alliance formation under proportional sharing rules with contests among individual players in a laboratory setting. The standard equilibrium predictions are identical for all players because the proportional rule ensures the same payoff incentives for...

Victorious alliances often fight about the spoils of war. We consider experimentally when members of victorious alliances accept a peaceful division of the spoils, and when they fight against each other, and how the inability to commit to a peaceful division affects their effort contributions in...

We study the impact of progress feedback in team-production contests, in which each team member is solely responsible for one part of the production task. Particularly, we employ a real-effort laboratory experiment to examine how team members react to the feedback in team-based (best-of-three)...

Our experimental analysis of alliances in conflicts leads to three main findings. First, even in the absence of repeated interaction, direct contact or communication, free-riding among alliance members is far less pronounced than what would be expected from non-cooperative theory. Second, this...

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...

The nineteenth century was a time of substantial changes in the patterns of economic growth. This was also a period of significant fluctuations in the structure of and allocation of political rights. Through successive franchise extensions, democracy expanded dramatically, giving birth to the...

We study how conflict in a contest game is influenced by rival parties being groups and by group members being able to punish each other. Our main motivation stems from the analysis of socio-political conflict. The relevant theoretical prediction in our setting is that conflict expenditures are...

We use a Tullock-type contest model to show that intuitively and structurally different contests can be strategically and revenue equivalent to each other. We consider a two-player contest, where outcome-contingent payoffs are linear functions of prizes, own effort, and the effort of the rival....

This paper proposes a multi-prize "reverse" nested lottery contest model, which can be viewed as the "mirror image" of the conventional nested lottery contest of Clark and Riis (1996a). The reverse-lottery contest model determines winners by selecting losers based on contestants' one-shot effort...