In this paper, we study a two-stage rent-seeking game. In the first stage, contestants compete a-la-Tullock; in the second stage, the winner can resell the rent a-la-Coase. We consider a complete information Tullock game in which the contestants have different valuations for the rent. The...

Understanding disparities in contest success is central to explaining how competition shapes the distribution of rewards, influence, or market shares. We introduce the Proportional Play Equilibrium (PPE), a boundedly rational alternative to Nash Equilibrium (NE) grounded in the Illusion of...

We experimentally contrast mathematical versus operational explanations of Tullock lottery contests. We contrast a protocol explaining the contest in terms of probability of winning, with an operational approach that carries out the random component of the contest as an explicit lottery each...

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...

We characterize the equilibrium set of the n-player Hirshleifer contest with homogeneous valuations. A symmetric equilibrium always exists. It necessarily corresponds to multilateral peace for sufficient noise and uses finite-support randomized strategies otherwise. Asymmetric equilibria are...

In this paper, we show that pure strategy Nash Equilibria in Prime Game and Expansive Game can be linked through an invertible mapping, with which the pure strategy Nash Equilibrium in Prime Game can be easily derived from Expansive Game. Our results provide a tool to solve pure strategy Nash...

We study signaling in dynamic contests with heterogeneous players. A privately-informed challenger faces a sequence of rivals of known types. The type of future rivals determines which signal the challenger wants to produce, whereas the strategic response of current rivals determines the extent...

This paper investigates how heterogeneity in contestants’ investment costs affects the competition intensity in a dynamic elimination contest. Theory predicts that the absolute level of investment costs has no effect on the competition intensity in homogeneous interactions. Relative cost...

This article examines behavior in the two-player, constant-sum Colonel Blotto game with asymmetric resources in which players maximize the expected number of battlefields won. The experimental results support all major theoretical predictions. In the auction treatment, where winning a...

We investigate how heterogeneity in contestants' investment costs affects competition expenditures in a dynamic elimination contest with different seeding variants of contestants. Theory predicts that expenditures in dynamic contests are lower when competitors are heterogeneous than when they...