The symmetric two-player Hirshleifer (1989) contest is shown to admit a unique equilibrium. The support of the equilibrium strategy is finite and includes, in particular, the zero expenditure level. We also establish a lower bound for the cardinality of the support and an upper bound for the...

In standard coalition games, players try to form a coalition to secure a prize and a coalition agreement specifies how the prize is to be split among its members. However, in practical situations where coalitions are formed, the actual split of the prize often takes place after the coalition...

We analyze Nash equilibria of share and probabilistic contests when players have distributional preferences. If players are sufficiently similar, distributional preferences create multiple equilibria. For the case of only mildly heterogeneous players, equilibrium effort can be lower as well as...

Rent seeking contest shapes the risk preference of the contestants. It instills in the weaker contestant who has little to lose and much to gain a preference for risk taking, and the weaker the contestant, the stronger the instilled preference for risk taking. On the other hand, it causes the...

We experimentally study endogenous alliance formation and contest effort choices in a generic three-player contest. Differences in intrinsic or extrinsic incentives to expend effort cause self-selection. Weakly motivated players have an incentive to enter into an alliance and to free-ride on...

The stable set of von Neumann and Morgenstern imposes credibility on coalitional deviations. Their credibility notion can be extended to cover farsighted coalitional deviations, as proposed by Harsanyi (1974), and more recently reformulated by Ray and Vohra (2015). However, the resulting...