Best-of-Three Contests: Experimental Evidence

We conduct an experimental analysis of a best-of-three Tullock contest. Intermediate prizes lead to higher efforts, while increasing the role of luck (as opposed to effort) leads to lower efforts. Both intermediate prizes and luck reduce the probability of contest ending in two rounds. The patterns of players‟ efforts and the probability that a contest ends in two rounds is consistent with „strategic momentum‟, i.e. momentum generated due to strategic incentives inherent in the contest. We do not find evidence for „psychological momentum‟, i.e. momentum which emerges when winning affects players‟ confidence. Similar to previous studies of contests, we find significantly higher efforts than predicted and strong heterogeneity in effort between subjects

Alliance Formation in Contests with Incomplete Information

This paper studies a contest in which players with unobservable types may form an alliance in a pre-stage of the game to join their forces and compete for a prize. We characterize the pure strategy equilibria of this game of incomplete information. We show that if the formation of an alliance is voluntary, players do not reveal private information in the process of alliance formation in any equilibrium. In this case there exists a pooling equilibrium without alliances with a unique effort choice in the contest and there exist equilibria in which all types prefer to form an alliance. If the formation of an alliance can be enforced by one player with positive probability there exists an equilibrium in which only the low types prefer to form an alliance.Der vorliegende Aufsatz untersucht ein Modell, in welchem Agenten mit unbeobachtbaren Typen ihre Kräfte in Allianzen vereinen können, bevor sie in einen Wettstreit um eine Ressource eintreten. Wir beschreiben die Gleichgewichte in reinen Strategien dieses Spiels unter unvollständiger Information. Für den Fall des freiwilligen Eintritts in eine Allianz zeigen wir, dass die Spieler in keinem Gleichgewicht private Information während der Bildung der Allianz offenbaren. In diesem Fall existiert ein vereinigendes Gleichgewicht ohne Allianz, in dem die Spieler eine eindeutige, typen-abhängige Investition im Wettstreit wählen. Es existieren auch vereinigende Gleichgewichte, in welchen es alle Spieler-Typen strikt bevorzugen, in eine Allianz einzutreten. Falls eine Allianz seitens eines Spielers mit positiver Wahrscheinlichkeit erzwungen werden kann, existiert ein trennendes Gleichgewicht, in welchem nur die schwachen Spieler-Typen in die Allianz eintreten wollen

A Survey of Experimental Research on Contests, All-Pay Auctions and Tournaments

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 provides a review of experimental research on these three canonical contests. First, we review studies investigating the basic structure of contests, including the contest success function, number of players and prizes, spillovers and externalities, heterogeneity, and incomplete information. Second, we discuss dynamic contests and multi-battle contests. Then we review research on sabotage, feedback, bias, collusion, alliances, and contests between groups, as well as real-effort and field experiments. Finally, we discuss applications of contests to the study of legal systems, political competition, war, conflict avoidance, sales, and charities, and suggest directions for future research. (author's abstract

Rent-seeking contests with independent private values

We consider symmetric rent-seeking contests with independent private valuations of the contest prize. For a two-parameter specification with continuous types, we fully characterize the Bayesian equilibrium, and study its basic properties. The willingness to waste is a hump-shaped function of the private valuation, with the median type expending the highest share of her valuation. A first-order (second-order) stochastic increase in the common type distribution raises (lowers) ex-ante expected efforts. However, neither first-order nor second-order stochastic dominance in valuations necessarily leads to a first-order stochastic dominance ranking in efforts. We also show that, as uncertainty vanishes, the Bayesian equilibrium converges to the Nash equilibrium of the model with complete information

Activity and inactivity in a rent-seeking contest with private information

We consider a rent-seeking contest in which one player has private information about his own valuation of the prize. This valuation may be either high or low. All other players have a known and identical valuation of the prize. We present necessary and sufficient conditions under which the privately informed player exerts a positive or zero equilibrium effort. Copyright Springer Science + Business Media, Inc. 2006