In this paper, we compare two procedures for allocating a sequence of fixed prizes in multi-stage nested Tullock contests, in which the number of prizes equals the number of contestants. In a winner-leave (loser-leave) procedure, in each stage, the prizes of the stage are allocated to winners...

Szidarovszky and Okuguchi (Games and Economic Behavior, 1997) have provided useful conditions for the existence of a unique pure-strategy Nash equilibrium in rent-seeking games of complete information. In this paper, we generalize their results to contests with incomplete informa tion. Two...

We consider multi-stage elimination contests, where agents efforts at different stages generate some output for the organizers. Depending on the output function we characterize the optimal prize structure of the tournament and show that it is almost efficient. We have found that in some cases...

Participants in an innovation contest may steal their opponents’ ideas to enhance their chance of winning. To model this, I introduce the ability to copy another player’s effort in a Tullock contest between two players. I characterise the unique equilibrium in this game dependent on the...

We characterize the equilibrium set of the n-player Hirshleifer contest with homogeneous valuations. A symmetric equilibrium always exists. It necessarily corresponds to multilateral peace for sufficient noise and uses finite-support randomized strategies otherwise. Asymmetric equilibria are...

The symmetric two-player Hirshleifer (1989) contest is shown to admit a unique equilibrium. The support of the equilibrium strategy is finite and includes, in particular, the zero expenditure level. We also establish a lower bound for the cardinality of the support and an upper bound for the...

We investigate a version of the classic Colonel Blotto game in which individual battles may have different values. Two players allocate a fixed budget across battlefields and each battlefield is won by the player who allocates the most to that battlefield. The winner of the game is the player...

This paper proposes the Stochastic-Share Contest, a novel contest format that combines the Winner-Take-All Contest and the Proportional-Prize Contest, with the former nesting the latter two as special cases. Motivated by the experimental contest literature, we include risk aversion and a "joy of...

We study the sorting of contestants across Tullock contests, and the allocation of a prize budget across these contests. Our benchmark result is that total effort is maximized by a unique grand contest and contestant exclusions decrease total effort. We consider two extensions of our benchmark...

While the game-theoretic analysis of conflict is often based upon the assumption of multiplicative noise, additive noise such as assumed by Hirshleifer (1989) may be equally plausible depending on the application. In this paper, we examine the equilibrium set of the n-player difference-form...