A Generalized Tullock Contest

Equilibria in Secure Strategies in the Tullock Contest

It is well known that a pure-strategy Nash equilibrium does not exist for a two-player rent-seeking contest when the contest success function parameter is greater than two. We analyze the contest using the concept of equilibrium in secure strategies, which is a generalization of the Nash equilibrium. It is defined by two conditions: (i) no player can make a profitable deviation that decreases t...

Generalized Contest Success Functions

The key element of models of contest is the Contest Success Function (CSF) which specifies the winning probabilities of agents. The existing axiomatizations of CSFs assume that contestants can make only one type of investment. This paper generalizes these axiomatizations to the case where each agent can have multiple types of investments. This allows us to provide a unified framework to extend ...

Level-k reasoning in a generalized beauty contest

We study how the predictive power of level-k models changes as we perturb the classical beauty contest setting along two dimensions: the strength of the coordination motive and the information symmetry. We use a variation of the Morris and Shin (2002) model as the unified framework for our study, and find that the predictive power of level-k models varies considerably along these two dimensions...

Rejoinder to Gordon Tullock

Mixed equilibria in Tullock contests

Any symmetric mixed-strategy equilibrium in a Tullock contest with intermediate values of the decisiveness parameter (“ 2)hascountablyinfinitelymanymasspoints.Allprobabilityweightisconcentratedonthosemasspoints, whichhavethezerobidastheirsolepointofaccumulation.Withcontestantsrandomizingoveranon− convexset, thereisacostofbeinghalfhearted, whichisabsentfromboththelotterycontestandtheall−payaucti...