Many economic, political and social environments can be described as contests in which agents exert costly efforts while competing over the distribution of a scarce resource. These environments have been studied using Tullock contests, all-pay auctions and rank-order tournaments. This survey...

Group contests are ubiquitous. Some examples include warfare between countries, competition between political parties, team-incentives within firms, group sports, and rent-seeking. In order to succeed, members of the same group have incentives to cooperate with each other by expending individual...

Costly competitions between economic agents are modeled as contests. Researchers use laboratory experiments to study contests and test comparative static predictions of contest theory. Commonly, researchers find that participants’ efforts are significantly higher than predicted by the standard...

There appear to be two seemingly contradictory images of economic change in the Islamic World and mixed evidence on whether Islamic societies have been open or conservative against modern ideas, technological advancements, and legal developments. Whereas a conservative attitude has been dominant...

This paper examines the complexity and "fuzzy logic" actually at play in governance in case studies such as HIH (Australia) and Enron (USA). The rules applying to each sector cannot fully explain events. Non?prescribed factors influencing behaviours affecting the interconnections,...

When Argentine sovereign default in December 2001 led to a collapse of the peso, the burden of dollar debt became demonstrably unsustainable. But it was not clear what restructuring was feasible, nor when. Eventually, in 2005 after a delay of more than three years, a supermajority of creditors...

This paper argues that graduated penalties observed in most legal systems may be an attempt to direct law enforcement e orts towards crimes that are socially more harmful, thereby achieving better deterrence overall. The critical assumptions are-- the state cannot commit to a monitoring...

Once a contract has been agreed by two agents, the problem of renegotiating breach under two-sided asymmetric information on the agents' outside options is equivalent to the problem of bilateral trade with uncertain gains. Thus, the theorem of Myerson and Satterthwaite (1983) implies the...

This document analyses collusion by innovative firms and the role of patents in a continuous-time real options framework. A patent-investment race model is formulated in which innovative firms bargain and reach collusive agreements. It is shown that, while collusion always delays innovation, it...

Many economic, political and social environments can be described as contests in which agents exert costly efforts while competing over the distribution of a scarce resource. These environments have been studied using Tullock contests, all-pay auctions and rankorder tournaments. This survey...