The strategic advantage of interdependent preferences in rent-seeking contests

We study rent-seeking contests, where the set of players contains two groups of players – one with independent preferences and the other with (negatively) interdependent preferences. It turns out that the latter experience a strategic advantage in general two-player contests and in n-player-contests with non-increasing marginal efficiency. For general n-player contests with increasing marginal efficiency, the strategic advantage prevails provIDed convexity of contest technologies is sufficiently weak. For strongly convex contest technologies, other types of equilibria exist, including one where indivIDualists receive strictly higher pay-off. Copyright Springer Science + Business Media B.V. 2006