Vendettas occur in many real world settings where rivals compete for a prize, e.g., winning an election or a competitive promotion, by engaging in retaliatory aggressive behavior. We present a benchmark experiment where two players have an initial probability of winning a prize. Retaliatory...

We consider a two-player contest model in which breakthroughs arrive according to privately observed Poisson processes. Each player's process continues as long as she exerts costly effort. The player who collects most breakthroughs until a predetermined deadline wins a prize.We derive Nash...