We provide conditions that simplify applying Reny's (1999) better-reply security to Bayesian games and use these conditions to prove the existence of equilibria for classes of games in which payoff discontinuities arise only at “ties.” These games include a general version of all-pay...

This paper presents a strategic model of risk-taking behavior in contests. Formally, we analyze an n-player winner-take-all contest in which each player decides when to stop a privately observed Brownian motion with drift. A player whose process reaches zero has to stop. The player with the...

I present a two-player nested contest which is a convex combination of two widely studied contests: the Tullock (lottery) contest and the all-pay auction. A Nash equilibrium exists for all parameters of the nested contest. If and only if the contest is sufficiently asymmetric, then there is an...

New relaxations of the Nash equilibrium concept are shown to exist in any strategic game with discontinuous payoff functions. The new concepts are used (1) to show the equivalence between Reny's better-reply security condition [28] and Simon-Zame's endogenous tie-breaking rule equilibrium...

This paper studies the existence of some known equilibrium solution concepts in a large class of economic models with discontinuous payo functions. The issue is well understood for Nash equilibria, thanks to Reny's better-reply security condition [34], and its recent improvements [3, 25, 35,...

Economic agents may sometimes find themselves in circumstances in which they are effectively endowed with preferences that place a priority on first meeting specific "acceptability standards" before attention can be placed on optimizing their "aspirational objective." We introduce the notion of...

I present a two-player nested contest which is a convex combination of two widely studied contests: the Tullock (lottery) contest and the all-pay auction. A Nash equilibrium exists for all parameters of the nested contest. If and only if the contest is sufficiently asymmetric, then there is an...