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

We investigate the Nash equilibria of asymmetric, winner-take-all, imperfectlydiscriminating contests, focussing on existence, uniqueness and rentdissipation. When the contest success function is determined by a productionfunction with decreasing returns for each contestant, equilibria...

We show that the presence of loss aversion on the part of participantsin a Tullock imperfectly discriminating contest will significantlyreduce the proportion of the rent dissipated in the form of resourcesused up in the competition for that rent...

Noncooperative games in which each player’s payo¤ function depends on anadditively separable function of every player’s choice variable may be transformedinto an aggregative game, which may be analysed using the conceptof ‘share functions’. The resulting approach avoids the...

The rent-seeking model of Tullock (1980) has stimulated a large literature on rent-seekingcontests, of which Hillman (1989) and Nitzan (1994) provide useful surveys. AlthoughTullock's 'winner take all' model has been adapted and extended in numerous ways, thereremain fundamental modeling issues,...

The paper proves that in two-player logit form symmetric contestswith concave success function, commitment to a particular strategydoes not increase a player's payo, while in contests with more thantwo players it does. The paper also provides a contest-like game inwhich commitment does not...

This paper shows that although small or nancially constrained environmentalistgroups may be in a weak position, relative to polluting industries, in the directcompetition for political inuence, they can compete indirectly through changingpublic preferences over environmental quality. However, in...

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

We examine a Stackelberg game where a financially constrainedleader faces competition from a ‘deep pocket’ follower. We analyzethe consequences of this trade-off between a financial and a strategicadvantage for both the design of financial contracts and market structure.We derive conditions...

We study aggregative games in which players’ strategy sets areconvex intervals of the real line and (not necessarily differentiable)payoffs depend only on a player’s own strategy and the sum of allplayers’ strategies. We give sufficient conditions on each player’s payofffunction to...