The paper presents experimental evidence on the impact of managers and their incentives on the behavior of group members in intergroup contests. I find that members follow the nonbinding investment recommendations of their group manager in particular if the managers payoff does not depend on the...

We investigate situations in which players make costly contributions as group members in a group conflict, and at the same time engage in contest with fellow group members to appropriate the possible reward. We introduce within group power asymmetry and complementarity in members'efforts, and...

We find the sufficient conditions for the existence of multiple equilibria in Tullock-type contests and show that asymmetric equilibria may arise even under symmetric prize and cost structures. We also identify contests in the literature where multiple equilibria exist under reasonably weak...

We consider a variant of the Tullock lottery contest. Each player's constant marginal cost of effort is drawn from a potentially different continuous distribution. In order to study the impact of incomplete information we compare three informational settings to each other: players are either...

The purpose of this paper is to propose a symmetric two player general contest model in order to study the relationship between equilibria and crucial structural parameters of the model. In particular, given a general specification of the players' set of possible entries, of the agents' utility...

In many real-world contests (political elections / lobbying for public projects), contestants try to engage supporters (unemployed youth / local residents) to fight for them. Such contests have the following features: a significant part of a contestant's supporter compensation is contingent upon...

This paper analyzes incumbency contests 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 incumbent, thereby regaining an...

We compare two contest. Decentralized in which there are several independent contests with non overlapping contestants and Centralized in which all contestants fight for a unique prize which is the sum of all prizes in the small contests. We study the relationship between payoffs and efforts...

We consider a best-of-three Tullock contest between two ex-ante identical players. An effort-maximizing designer commits to a vector of player-specific biases (advantages or disadvantages). In our benchmark model the designer chooses victory-dependent biases (i.e., the biases depend on the...

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...