We consider a general class of imperfectly discriminating contests with privately informed players. We show that findings by Athey (2001) imply the existence of a Bayesian Nash equilibrium in monotone pure strategies.

We consider a variant of the Tullock rent-seeking contest. Under symmetric information we determine equilibrium strategies and prove their uniqueness. Then, we assume contestants to be privately informed about their costs of effort. We prove existence of a pure-strategy equilibrium and provide a...

Can comparative statements be credible even when absolute statements are not? For instance, can a professor credibly rank different students for a prospective employer even if she has an incentive to exaggerate the merits of each student? Or can an analyst credibly rank different stocks even if...

We consider a variant of the Tullock rent-seeking contest. Under symmetric information we determine equilibrium strategies and prove their uniqueness. Then, we assume contestants to be privately informed about their costs of effort. We prove existence of a pure-strategy equilibrium and provide a...

We consider a general class of imperfectly discriminating contests with privately informed players. We show that findings by Athey (2001) imply the existence of a Bayesian Nash equilibrium in monotone pure strategies.

This article examines behavior in two-person constant-sum Colonel Blotto games in which each player maximizes the expected total value of the battlefields won. A lottery contest success function is employed in each battlefield. Recent experimental research on such games provides only partial...

We study the possibility of peace when two countries fight a war over the ownership of a resource. War is always the outcome of the game played by rational countries - under complete or asymmetric information - when there is no pre-established distribution of the resource among countries. When...

This paper studies the incentives for interim voluntary disclosure of verifiable information in probabilistic all-pay contests. Provided that the contest is uniformly asymmetric, full revelation is the unique perfect Bayesian equilibrium outcome. This is so because the weakest type of the...

This paper studies the incentives for interim voluntary disclosure of verifiable information in probabilistic all-pay contests. Provided that the contest is uniformly asymmetric, full revelation is the unique perfect Bayesian equilibrium outcome. This is so because the weakest type of the...

This paper considers a model in which an activist or terrorist uses violence to signal commitment to a political agenda. We examine how this violent signaling may be countered and reduced by the use of information-gathering mechanisms. Signaling through violent activism does not necessarily...