Wars of conquest and wars of independence are characterized by an asymmetric payoff structure: one party gets aggregate production if it wins, and its own production if it loses, while the other party gets only its own production if it wins, and nothing if it loses. We study a model of war with...

This paper analyzes a tug-of-war contest between two teams. In each round of the tug of war a pair of agents from the opposing teams competes in a private value all-pay auction with asymmetric type distributions and effort effectiveness. Whichever team arrives first at a given lead in terms of...

This paper analyzes a tug of war contest between two teams. In each round of the tug of war a pair of agents from the opposing teams competes in a private value all-pay auction with asymmetric type distributions and effort effectiveness. Whichever team arrives first at a given lead in terms of...

The present paper analyzes situations in which groups compete for rents. A major result in the literature has been that there are both cases where larger groups have advantages and cases where they have disadvantages. The paper provides two intuitive criteria which for groups with homogenous...

The private provision of public goods suffers from two potential types of efficiency failures: non-optimal output levels of the public good (quantity problem) and an inefficient mix of contributors and non-contributors (sorting problem). Embedding the provision game into a contest that rewards...

The present paper analyzes situations in which groups compete for rents. A major result in the literature has been that there are both cases where larger groups have advantages and cases where they have disadvantages. The paper provides two intuitive criteria which for groups with homogenous...

The present paper analyzes the occurrence of the group-size paradox in situations in which groups compete for rents, allowing for degrees of rivalness of the rent among group members. We provide two intuitive criteria which for groups with homogenous valuations of the rent determine whether...

The present paper analyzes situations in which groups compete for rents. A major result in the literature has been that there are both cases where larger groups have advantages and cases where they have disadvantages. The paper provides two intuitive criteria which for groups with homogenous...

We present a general model of two players contest with two types of efforts. Contrary to the classical models of contest, where each player chooses a unique effort, and where the outcome depends on the efforts of all the players, contestants are allowed to reduce the effort of the opponent....

This paper studies sabotage in a contest with non-identical players. Unlike previous papers, we consider sabotage in an elimination contest and allow contestants to sabotage a potential or future rival. It turns out that for a certain partition of players there is a pure-strategy equilibrium in...