hierarchical contests and comparing the implications of centralized with decentralized governance. Increasing information available …

advantage in the final stage. We examine such momentum in conflict scenarios and investigate how valuable it must be to avoid a …, rent dissipation in the two-stage conflict is equal across party whether or not an individual obtains first-stage momentum … more rent-dissipative than innate/uncontestable advantage. Therefore, Pyrrhic victories should be more common for contests …

We consider a general class of imperfectly discriminating contests with privately informed players. We show that …

Many economic and political decisions are the outcome of strategic contests for a given prize. The nature of such … contests can be determined by a designer who is driven by political considerations with a specific political culture. The main …