Two individuals are involved in a conflict situation in which preferences are ex ante uncertain. While they eventually learn their own preferences, they have to pay a small cost if they want to learn their opponent's preferences. We show that, for sufficiently small positive costs of information...

We consider a variant of the Tullock lottery contest. Each player's constant marginal cost of effort is drawn from a potentially different continuous distribution. In order to study the impact of incomplete information we compare three informational settings to each other: players are either...

The effects of pre-play communication in a coordination game with incomplete information about players' intensity of preferences are compared to no communication controls. Pre-play communication significantly increases subjects' payoffs and the probability of coordination, while reducing...

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 incentives for the interim voluntary disclosure of verifiable information in probabilistic all-pay contests. Considered are unfair contests, i.e., contests in which, subject to activity conditions, one player (the favorite) is interim always more likely to win than the other...

This paper studies the incentives for interim voluntary disclosure of verifiable information in probabilistic all-pay contests with two-sided incomplete information. Private information may concern marginal cost, valuations, and ability. Our main result says that, if the contest is uniformly...

We propose an elementary theory of wars fought by fully rational contenders that features three of the main rationalist explanations for armed conflicts: uncertainty, commitment, and indivisibility. Two parties play a Markov game that combines stages of bargaining, where offers are made, with...

We study deterrence in sequential move conflicts, modeled as a contest. We bias the model in favor of peace by assuming that under complete information deterrence is achieved and peace prevails. We show that under incomplete information about states' types (resolve) the chances of deterrence...