In fiscal interaction, a policy is evolutionarily stable if, once adopted by all governments, jurisdictions that deviate from it fare worse than those that stick to it. Evolutionary stability is the appropriate solution concept for models of imitative learning (policy mimicking). We show that...

We apply an indirect evolutionary approach to player’ perceived prize valuations in contests. Evolution in finite populations leads to preferences that overstate the prize’s material value and induce overexpenditure. We establish an equivalence between the behavior evolutionarily stable...

This paper examines multi-battle contests whose extensive form can be represented in terms of a finite state machine. We start by showing that any contest that satisfies our assumptions decomposes into two phases, a principal phase (in which states cannot be revisited) and a concluding...

We consider a two-player advertising race subject to momentum. Momentum is modelled as a complementarity between current and past campaign spending in a way that is reminiscent of models of addiction and habit formation: the more effective a player's past spending has been, the more effective...