In many real world contests, players can influence their chances of winning through two or more activities or "arms." In this paper, we analyze the equilibrium properties of a two-player two-armed contest, and compare them to those of a standard two-player one-armed contest. Several interesting...

In many contests, players can influence the outcome through efforts in multiple activities, several of which can be chosen before others. In this paper, we develop a model of dynamic multi-activity contests. Players simultaneously choose efforts in long-run activities, observe each other’s...

In many contests, players can influence their chances of winning through multiple activities or "arms." We develop a simple model of multi-armed contests and axiomatize its contest success function. We then analyze the outcomes of the multi-armed contest and the effects of allowing or...

In many industries, firms reward their customers for making referrals. We analyze the optimal policy mix of price, advertising intensity, and a referral fee for monopoly when buyers choose to what extent to refer other consumers to the firm. We find that the firm advertises less under referrals,...

Jun and Kim (2008) consider the optimal pricing and referral strategy of a monopoly that uses a consumer communication network to spread product information. They show that for any finite referral chain, the optimal policy involves a referral fee that provides strictly positive referral...