We study why a ruling minority (the elite) inevitably emerges from power struggles. Power struggles are modeled as iterative coalition formations where players use their power to form alliances and eliminate others without formal commitment. We show that when players can strategically relinquish...

We study a class of multi-stage imperfectly discriminatory team contests with Blotto budgets and complete information. We fully characterize the pure strategy Nash equilibrium for this class of contests under certain basic assumptions, and show that in the two-stage case, there will be a unique...

This article considers the interaction between two types of effort in lobbying contests: effort that improves the contestant's own performance (standard rent seeking), and effort that reduces particular rivals' performance (sabotage). Due to a positive externality, sabotage is a 'small number'...

We construct a generalized Tullock contest under complete information where contingent upon winning or losing, the payoff of a player is a linear function of prizes, own effort, and the effort of the rival. This structure nests a number of existing contests in the literature and can be used to...

In this paper, we generalize the General Lotto game and the Colonel Blotto game to allow for battlefield valuations that are heterogeneous across battlefields and asymmetric across players, and for the players to have asymmetric resource constraints. We completely characterize Nash equilibrium...

When are comparative statements credible? For instance, when can a professor rank different students for an employer, or a stock analyst rank different stocks for a client? We show that simple complementarity conditions ensure that an expert with private information about multiple issues can...

Economic and social situations where groups have to compete are ubiquitous. Such group contests create both a coordination problem within and between groups. Introducing leaders may help to mitigate these coordination problems. However, little is known about the effect of leadership in group...

Following Russia’s attack on Ukraine on February 24, 2022, Western countries have been providing military assistance to Ukraine. However, relative to GDP, the support from the small Baltic and Nordic countries has been greater than that of the larger European NATO countries. This article...

Economic and social situations where groups have to compete are ubiquitous. Such group contests create both a coordination problem within and between groups. Introducing leaders may help to mitigate these coordination problems. However, little is known about the effect of leadership in group...