The evolutionary stability of payoff-maximizing preferences in the model of indirect evolution in symmetric games depends on the slope of the reaction function being zero at equilibrium. The application of this result to contests confirms that in two-player contests the optimal delegation...

In a semi-aggregative representation of a game, the payoff of a player depends on a player's own strategy and on a personalized aggregate of all players' strategies. Suppose that each player has a conjecture about the reaction of the personalized aggregate to a change in the player's own...