Preempting versus Postponing: the Stealing Game

We present an endogenous timing game of action commitment in which play- ers can steal from each other parts of a homogeneous and perfectly divisible pie (market). We show how the incentives to preempt or to follow the rivals radi- cally change with the number of players involved in the game. In the course of the analysis we also introduce, discuss and apply the concept of pu-dominance, a generalization of the risk-dominance criterion to games with more than two players.