We study experimentally the effects of cost structure and prize allocation rules on the performance of rent-seeking contests. Most previous studies use a lottery prize rule and linear cost, and find both overdissipation relative to Nash equilibrium prediction and significant variation in...

This paper experimentally examines behavior in a two-player game of attack and defense of a weakest-link network of targets, in which the attacker's objective is to successfully attack at least one target and the defender's objective is diametrically opposed. We apply two benchmark contest...

The standard innovation race specification assumes a memoryless exponential distribution for the time to success of an R&D project. This specification implies that a project succeeds, eventually, with probability one. We introduce a positive probability that an R&D project fails. With this...