This paper analyzes a two-player all-pay auction with incomplete information. More precisely, one bidder is uncertain about the size of the initial advantage of his rival modeled as a head start in the auction.I derive the unique Bayesian Nash equilibrium outcome for a large class of cumulative...

This paper studies coalition formation among individuals who differ in productivity. The output of a coalition is determined by the sum of the productivities and the size of the coalition. We consider egalitarian societies in which coalitions split their surplus equally and individualistic...

Games in which players aim to guess a fraction or multiple p of the average guess are known as guessing games or (p-)beauty contests. In this note, we derive a full characterization of the set of rationalizable strategies and the set of pure strategy Nash equilibria for such games as a function...

This paper studies coalition formation among individuals who differ in productivity. The output of a coalition is determined by the sum of productivities if the coalition exceeds a minimal threshold of members. We consider competitive societies in which the surplus of a coalition is split...

In this paper, we consider a sequence of multi-prize all-pay auctions, where the contestants who exert the lowest efforts in a round are eliminated. We analyze if and how the behavior of contestants is influenced by the possibility that strong rivals are eliminated along the way. The conditions...

This paper investigates whether contest schemes induce excessive risk-taking by implementing in the laboratory a novel stopping task based on the contest model of Seel and Strack (2013). In this stylized setting, managers who face contest payoffs have an incentive to delay halting projects with...

We develop an index of competitiveness and cooperativeness which is based on the primitives of a normal-form game, i.e., players, strategies and payoffs. The index relies on a unique decomposition of a given game into a zero-sum game and a common-interest game. The index decreases in the...

In this paper, I study the impact of asymmetric loss constraints on risk-taking behavior in contests. More precisely, contestants have different maximal loss restrictions in the contest model of Seel and Strack (2013), where players choose when to stop a privately observed Brownian motion and...