This paper analyses the behaviour of TV gameshow contestants to estimate risk aversion. We are able to show that the gameshow participants are broadly representative of the population as a whole. The gameshow has a number of features that makes it well suited for our analysis: the format is...

This paper considers the extent to which expenditure by contestants in imperfectly discriminating rent-seeking contests dissipates all or only part of the rent. In particular, we investigate strategic effects, technological effects and asymmetry under an assumption of diminishing returns to...

We study Nash equilibria of joint production games under a mixed output sharing rule in which part of the output (the mixing parameter) is shared in proportion to inputs and the rest according to exogenously determined shares. This rule includes proportional sharing and equal sharing as special...

We show that the presence of loss aversion on the part of participants in a Tullock imperfectly discriminating contest will significantly reduce the proportion of the rent dissipated in the form of resources used up in the competition for that rent. We also suggest a simple experiment that can...

We show in the context of a bilateral oligopoly where all agents are allowed to behave strategically the unexpected result that when the number of buyers becomes large the outcomes in a strategic market game do not converge to those at the Cournot equilibrium. However, convergence to Cournot...

We investigate the pure-strategy Nash equilibria of asymmetric, winner-take-all, imperfectly discriminating contests, focussing on existence, uniqueness and rent dissipation. When the contest success function is determined by a production function with decreasing returns for each contestant,...

We suggest an alternative way of analyzing the canonical Bergstrom-Blume-Varian model of non-cooperative voluntary contributions to a public good that avoids the proliferation of dimensions as the number of players is increased. We exploit this approach to analyze models in which the aggregate...

We examine the ability of expected utility function ofthe Friedman-Savage type to account for gambling when consumers also have opportunities for intertemporal substitutions. When the time horizon is infinite, we demonstrate that even in intra-period utility functions have the Friedman-savage...

We describe a model of participation in lottery games designed to address the optimisation of tax revenue in state-sponsored lotteries. The model treats participants dynamically and examines a long-run equilibrium. A novel high frequency approximation is used to turn the problem into a static,...

We investigate the Nash equilibria of asymmetric, winner-take-all, imperfectly discriminating contests, focusing on existence, uniqueness and rent dissipation. When the contest success function is determined by a production function with decreasing returns for each contestant, equilibria are...