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...

The sum of a supermodular function, assumed nondecreasing in the choice variable, and of a 'concavely supermodularizable' function, assumed nonincreasing in the parameter variable, satisfies the Milgrom-Shannon (1994, Monotone comparative statics, Econometrica 62, 157-180) single crossing...

Biconcavity is a simple condition on inverse demand that corresponds to the ordinary concept of concavity after simultaneous parameterized transformations of price and quantity. The notion is employed here in the framework of the homogeneous-good Cournot model with potentially heterogeneous...

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...

This paper studies a large class of imperfectly discriminating contests, referred to as elastic contests, that induce players to either overbid a standing bid or to abstain from bidding altogether. Many common forms of contest are elastic. In any equilibrium of an elastic contest, there is...

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....

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...

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...