Concerns for relative performance are integrated into a model of contractual renegotiation in bilateral trade. It is shown that concerns for relative performance do never impede efficient trade. Moreover, conditional on renegotiation to occur, concerns for relative performance tend to mitigate...

Optimal rank-order tournaments have traditionally been studied using a first-order approach. The present analysis relies instead on the construction of an "upper envelope" over all incentive compatibility conditions. lt turns out that the first-order approach is not innocuous. For example, in...

In a less widely known contribution, Béla Martos (1966, Hungarian Academy of Sciences) introduced a generalized notion of concavity that is closely related to what is nowadays known as r-concavity in the operations research literature, and that is identical to what is nowadays known as...

It is shown that rent-seeking contests with continuous and independent type distributions possess a unique pure-strategy Nash equilibrium.

The Hotelling game of pure location allows interpretations in spatial competition, political theory, and professional forecasting. In this paper, the doubly symmetric mixed-strategy equilibrium for n ≥ 4 firms is characterized as the solution of a well-behaved boundary value problem. The...

Szidarovszky and Okuguchi (Games and Economic Behavior, 1997) have provided useful conditions for the existence of a unique purestrategy Nash equilibrium in rent-seeking games of complete information. In this paper, we generalize their results to contests with incomplete information. Two...

Any symmetric mixed-strategy equilibrium in a Tullock contest with intermediate values of the decisiveness parameter ("2 R ∞") has countably infinitely many mass points. All probability weight is concentrated on those mass points, which have the zero bid as their sole point of accumulation....

This paper considers rent-seeking games in which a small percentage change in a player's bid has a large percentage impact on her odds of winning, i.e., on the ratio of her respective probabilities of winning and losing. An example is the Tullock contest with a high R. The analysis provides a...

Some of the most beautiful results in mechanism design depend crucially on Myerson?s (1981) regularity condition. E.g., the second-price auction with reserve price is revenue maximizing only if the type distribution is regular. This paper offers two main results. First, an interpretation of...

The N-firm Cournot model with general technologies is reviewed to derive generalized and unified conditions for existence of a pure strategy Nash equilibrium. Tight conditions are formulated alternatively (i) in terms of concavity of two-sided transforms of inverse demand, or (ii) as linear...