We introduce learning by doing in a dynamic contest. Contestants compete in an early round and can use the experience gained to reduce effort cost in a subsequent contest. A contest designer can decide how much of the prize mass to distribute in the early contest and how much to leave for the...

The paper deals with rent-seeking behaviour among agents competing for future shares of a common renewable natural resource. Rent-seeking might become profitable when the agents expect that the distribution of the natural resource in future periods will be dependent on the agents' extraction of...

We consider an industry where one firm with a superior technology competes for market shares with several rivals. The owner of the superior technology (the dominant firm) can license or transfer the source of its dominance to a subset of rivals. Allowing the non-license takers to remain active...

We consider an effort-maximizing principal distributing a prize fund over two consecutive all-pay auctions. The two contestants are doubly heterogeneous: one of them has a head start in the first contest; and winning contest one gives an advantage in contest two that varies between players. We...

Where product innovation requires several complementary patents, fragmented property rights can be a factor that limits firms’ willingness to invest in the development and commercialization of new products. This paper studies multiple simultaneous R&D contests for complementary patents...

This paper analyses endogenous formation of technology sharing coalitions with asymmetric firms. Coalition partners produce complementary technology advancements, although firms do not co-operate on R&D investment level or in the product market. The equilibrium coalition outcome is either...

We consider production by a firm that relies on the patent rights that are held by other actors. Before production can take place, bargains have to be struck with each patent holder over the royalty per unit produced. In the negotiations, a patent holder must be mindful of the fact that a large...

This note extends the axiomatic characterization of the "power" success function in fair contests by Skaperdas (1996) to an unfair contest. We show that the results previously obtained are straightforward to generalize; the success function is uniquely characterized by Luce's Choice Axiom...