We examine innovation as a timing game with complete information and observable actions in which firms decide when to enter a market. We characterize all pure strategy subgame perfect equilibria for the two-player symmetric game. In particular, we describe all subgame perfect equilibria when...

In many contests, a participant’s choices can influence the value of the prize on offer. However, in the standard contest model, the value of the prize is exogenous and participants have discretion only over the effort they exert. This paper proposes a new type of N -player contest in which...

We examine innovation as a market-entry timing game with complete information and observable actions. We allow for heterogenous payoffs between players, and for a leader's payoff functions to be multi-peaked and non-monotonic. Assuming that the follower's payoff is non-increasing with the time...

We study contests in which the prize depends on the number of participants, and show that equilibrium effort can be increasing, decreasing, or non-monotonic in the number of participants. This contrasts with the standard result for contests with fixed prizes in which effort is decreasing in the...