We examine the effects of endogenous sequences on the fairness in round-robin tournaments with four players, multiple prizes, and general contest technologies. A tournament is called horizontally ex-ante fair if symmetric contestants have the same expected payoffs (odds) before the tournament...

This paper examines the chance of winning a Tullock-contest when participants differ in both their talent and their attitude towards risk. For the case of CARA preferences, it is shown that the winning probability may be higher for a low-skilled agent with a low degree of risk aversion than for...

We study a two-sided markets model of two competing television stations that offer content of differentiated quality to ad-averse consumers and advertising space to firms. As all consumers prefer high over low quality content, competition for viewers is vertical. By contrast, competition for...

We study the influence of reason and intuition on decision making over time. Facing a sequence of similar problems, agents can either decide rationally according to expected utility theory or intuitively according to case-based decision theory. Rational decisions are more precise but create...

I investigate a simple model of advance-purchase contracts as a mode of financing costly projects. The analysis can easily be reinterpreted as a model of the monopolistic provision of excludable public goods under private information. An entrepreneur has to meet some capital requirement in order...

We compare the strategic potential of Corporate Social Responsibility and Customer Orientation as commitments to larger quantities in Cournot competition. In addition to profits, firms can choose to care for the surplus of either all consumers (CSR) or their own customers only (CO), and if so,...

We study strategic investment decisions in multi-stage contests with heterogeneous players. Our theoretical model of a round-robin rank-order tournament predicts that players conserve resources in a current contest to spend more in the subsequent contest if the degree of heterogeneity in the...

I examine the impact of risk preferences on efforts and winning probabilities in generalised Tullock contests between two players. The theoretical analysis yields two main results. First, I specify a sufficient condition on the agents’ comparative prudence under which a higher common level of...

We examine the strategic use of Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) in imperfectly competitive markets. The level of CSR determines the weight a firm puts on consumer surplus in its objective function before it decides upon supply. First, we consider symmetric Cournot competition and show that...

We investigate how individual risk preferences affect the likelihood of selecting the more able contestant within a two-player Tullock contest. Our theoretical model yields two main predictions: First, an increase in the risk aversion of a player worsens her odds unless she already has a...