This paper presents a formal theory of reciprocity. Reciprocity means that people reward kind actions and punish unkind ones. The theory takes into account that people evaluate the kindness of an action not only by its consequences but also by the intention underlying this action. The theory...

We conduct a contest experiment where participants can invest in increasing both the mean and the spread of an uncertain performance variable. Subjects are treated with different prize schemes and in accordance with theory we observe substantial investments in spread. We find that both types of...

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...

This paper studies a class of games, quot;All-Pay Contestsquot;, which captures general asymmetries and sunk investments inherent in scenarios such as lobbying, competition for market power, labor-market tournaments, and Ramp;D races. Players compete for one of several identical prizes by...

The Colonel Blotto game is a two-player constant-sum game in which each player simultaneously distributes her fixed level of resources across a set of contests. In the traditional formulation of the Colonel Blotto game, the players' resources are quot;use it or lose itquot; in the sense that any...

Tournaments consisting of iterative matches are a common mechanism for determining how to allocate a prize. For this reason it is important to understand the behavioral as well as the theoretical properties of different tournament structures. Given that laboratory experiments have consistently...

This paper examines the role of status acquisition as a motive for giving in voluntary contributions to public goods. In particular, every donor's status is given by the difference between his contribution and that of the other donor. Specifically, I show that contributors give more than in...

We consider a multi-stage game where firms first choose product quality and then compete for sales in the product market. We show how the equilibrium qualities are influenced by timing (sequential or simultaneous) of quality choices depends on the type of competition (Bertrand or Cournot) in the...

This paper presents a formal theory of reciprocity. Reciprocity means that people reward kind actions and punish unkind ones. The theory takes into account that people evaluate the kindness of an action not only by its consequences but also by the intention underlying this action. The theory...

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...