Continuing Wars of Attrition

Continuing Wars of Attrition

This paper presents a new model of the war of attrition, based on a geographical or territorial dispute. Both sides try to extend their boundaries, and the level of effort at each time is endogenous. There are two kinds of stationary equilibria, one with fighting to completion, the other with a cessation of hostilities. As a player gets closer to losing, that player's probability of winning bat...

Continuing Wars of Attrition

Asymmetries in the abilities of contestants that engage in a protracted competition appear to be more common than symmetric competitions. Why doesn’t the weaker player concede immediately? This paper introduces a model based on the idea that a “war” can only be won by winning a series of battles. There are two kinds of stationary equilibria, one with fighting to completion, the other with a ces...

Wars of Attrition with Endogenously Determined Budget Constraints∗

This paper models a war of attrition where participants first choose contest investment levels that act as a constraint for how long they can compete. To include a measure of the resource’s transferability to other uses (e.g. other contests), expenditures are a convex combination of investment decisions and their ‘bid’ in the contest. It is shown in the symmetric equilibrium that participants u...

Reputational Wars of Attrition with Complex Bargaining Postures

Consider a two-person intertemporal bargaining problem in which players choose actions and collect payo¤s while bargaining proceeds. Theory is silent regarding how the surplus is likely to be split, because a folk theorem applies. Perturbing such a game with a rich set of behavioral types for each player yields a speci…c asymptotic prediction for how the surplus will be divided, as the perturba...

Jean Pierre Benoit N Person Wars of Attrition