This article examines behavior in two-person constant-sum Colonel Blotto games in which each player maximizes the expected total value of the battlefields won. A lottery contest success function is employed in each battlefield. Recent experimental research on such games provides only partial...

Standard theoretical prediction is that rational economic agents participating in rent-seeking contests should engage in socially inefficient behavior by exerting costly efforts. Experimental studies find that the actual efforts of participants are significantly higher than predicted and that...

Appointing public officials is an important feature of modern democracies. Citizens are periodically asked to select amongst different candidates whom they want to appoint as public officials in central or local governments. There may be a trade-off on the extent to which candidates are seen as...

We set up an experiment to measure voter preferences trade-offs between competence and honesty. We measure the competence and honesty of candidates by asking them to work on a real effort task and decide whether to report truthfully or not the value of their work. In the first stage, the...

How divided is the UK in the aftermath of the Brexit result? The present study addresses this question by administering a multiple round mini-dictator game to a sample of 1,558 British adults to examine how party and EU referendum identity are associated with non-political social behaviour....

A well-known theoretical result in the contest literature is that greater heterogeneity decreases performance of contestants because of the “discouragement effect.” Leveling the playing field by favoring weaker contestants through bid-caps and favorable tie-breaking rules can reduce the...

Conflict and competition often impose costs on both winners and losers, and conflicting parties may prefer to resolve the dispute before it occurs. The equilibrium of a conflict game with side-payments predicts that with binding offers, proposers make and responders accept side-payments,...

A main goal of affirmative action (AA) policies is to enable disadvantaged groups to compete with their privileged counterparts. Existing theoretical and empirical research documents that incorporating AA can result in both more egalitarian outcomes and higher exerted efforts. However, the...

Sequential multi-battle contests are predicted to induce lower expenditure than simultaneous contests. This prediction is a result of a “New Hampshire Effect” – a strategic advantage created by the winner of the first battle. Although our laboratory study provides evidence for the New...

We experimentally study behavior in a simple voting game where players have private information about their preferences. With random matching, subjects overwhelmingly follow the dominant strategy to exaggerate their preferences, which leads to inefficiency. Applying a linking mechanism suggested...