The symmetric two-player Hirshleifer (1989) contest is shown to admit a unique equilibrium. The support of the equilibrium strategy is finite and includes, in particular, the zero expenditure level. We also establish a lower bound for the cardinality of the support and an upper bound for the...

To analyze players' strategic alliance behavior, we introduce a new noncooperative coalitional bargaining model, in which each player can buy out other players with upfront transfers. We uncover the role of an essential player in a transferable utility game, or a veto player in a simple game, in...

I study sequential contests where the efforts of earlier players may be disclosed to later players by nature or by design. The model has a range of applications, including rent seeking, R&D, oligopoly, public goods provision, and tragedy of the commons. I show that information about other...

We study dynamic sequential majoritarian campaigns between two players. The winner of the campaign is whomever wins the majority of individual battles. The resource being expended is determined exogenously to the campaign and has no scrap value. We demonstrate, in a fairly general environment,...

In a society composed of citizens and a dictator: what are the conditions for a successful citizens' revolt? What kind of strategies do governments follow to prevent such revolts? In this paper we argue that the concept of networks is a very powerful tool to understand these issues, as shown...

We study competitive behavior in all-pay Tullock (1980) contests with identity-dependent externalities (IDEs) governed by a fixed network. First, we introduce a model of network contest games, in which the prize generates an externality---which may be positive or negative---that impacts each...

Multi-battle team contests are ubiquitous in real-life competitions. All temporal structures of multi-battle team contests yield the same total effort, as demonstrated by Fu, Lu, and Pan (2015, American Economic Review, 105(7): 2120-40)'s remarkable temporal-structure independence. Rather than...

We investigate optimal favoritism using identity-contingent prizes in a two-player Tullock model. Besides the usual balance effect, prize allocation has an extra efficiency effect: One additional unit of prize tends to induce more effort, if it is used as the winning prize for the stronger...

How does opinion polarization over matters of moral conviction affect the legislative outcome of parliamentary institutions? Analysis reveals that in the relatively common case, in which a party's voting power is positively correlated with the public support of the convictions it represents, if...

In this paper, we show that pure strategy Nash Equilibria in Prime Game and Expansive Game can be linked through an invertible mapping, with which the pure strategy Nash Equilibrium in Prime Game can be easily derived from Expansive Game. Our results provide a tool to solve pure strategy Nash...