This paper presents a unified framework for characterizing symmetric equilibrium in simultaneous move, two-player, rank-order contests with complete information, in which each player's strategy generates direct or indirect affine spillover effects that depend on the rank-order of her decision...

In a dynamic contest where it is costly to compete, a player who is behind must decide whether to surrender or to keep fighting in the face of bleak odds. We experimentally examine the game theoretic prediction of last stand behavior in a multi-battle contest with a winning prize and losing...

Despite the wide occurrence of ties in a variety of contest settings, the strategic interaction that arises when ties are treated as viable outcomes has received little attention. Building on recent theoretical work, we experimentally examine an extension of the canonical two-player all-pay...

This paper studies electoral competition in a model of redistributive politics with deterministic voting and heterogeneous voter loyalties to political parties. We construct a natural measure of party strength based on the sizes and intensities of a party's loyal voter segments and demonstrate...

We study group competition with a single public good prize, perfectly discriminating contest success function, and the weakest-link effort technology, in which the marginal cost of effort for each player is private information. We focus on pure strategy Bayes-Nash equilibria and show that...

We consider a class of incomplete-information Colonel Blotto games in which N ≥ 2 agents are engaged in (N + 1) battlefields. An agent's vector of battlefield valuations is drawn from a generalized sphere in L_p-space. We identify a Bayes-Nash equilibrium in which any agent's resource...