This paper considers terrorism as an extortion activity. It uses tools from the theory of extortion and from conflict theory to describe how terrorism works, why terrorism is a persistent phenomenon, why terrorism is a violent phenomenon, and how retaliation affects the outcome. The analysis...

This article examines behavior in the two-player, constant-sum Colonel Blotto game with asymmetric resources in which players maximize the expected number of battlefields won. The experimental results support all major theoretical predictions. In the auction treatment, where winning a...

The same contestants often meet repeatedly in contests. Behavior in a contest potentially provides information with regard to one's type and can therefore influence the behavior of the opponents in later contests. This paper shows that if effort is observable, this can induce a ratchet effect in...

We introduce a noncooperative multilateral bargaining model for a network-restricted environment, in which players can communicate only with their neighbors. Each player strategically chooses the bargaining partners among the neighbors to buy out their communication links with upfront transfers....

In a society composed of a ruler and its citizens: what are the determinants of the political equilibrium between these two? This paper approaches this problem as a game played between a ruler who has to decide the distribution of the aggregate income and a group of agents/citizens who have the...

In contest models with symmetric valuations, equilibrium payoffs are positive shares of the value of the prize. In contrast to a bargaining situation, these shares sum to less than one because a share of the value is lost due to rent-dissipation. We ask: can every such division into payoff...

We consider a general class of imperfectly discriminating contests with privately informed players. We show that findings by Athey (2001) imply the existence of a Bayesian Nash equilibrium in monotone pure strategies.

We consider a variant of the Tullock rent-seeking contest. Under symmetric information we determine equilibrium strategies and prove their uniqueness. Then, we assume contestants to be privately informed about their costs of effort. We prove existence of a pure-strategy equilibrium and provide a...

This paper analyzes iterated incumbency contests with heterogeneous valuations in a large population setting. Incumbents repeatedly face different challengers, holding on to their positions until defeated in a contest. Defeated incumbents turn into challengers until they win a contest against an...

We analyze binary choice models in communication networks, in which both, the formation of links in the network as well as the action choices are endogenous. We provide a complete characterization of the equilibrium action choices and networks, where agents choose their strategies - actions and...