Suchergebnisse

Contests are games in which the players compete for a valuable prize by exerting effort or using resources so as to increase their probability of winning. This paper examines two player multi-item contests, a class of games in which players are faced with a decision about how much of a given resource to devote to an entire collection or sequence of different contests. Applications include multi-item rent-seeking behavior, multi-good marketing and advertising, multi-jurisdictional political contests. In these games, even when the (uncertain) outcomes in each contest are assumed to be mutually statistically independent, equilibrium efforts can exhibit strong interdependencies. Changes in either the contest success function or value of the prize in one contest usually alter the equilibrium amount of resources devoted to all contests by both players. We unify and extend results from marketing and political science, and also derive conditions under which both players exert zero effort in equilibrium in some subset of contests.

"Die Arbeit untersucht Wettbewerbsstrukturen, in denen die Teilnehmer eines
Turniers in mehr als einer beobachtbaren Dimension oder Outputgröße miteinander
konkurrieren, und in denen ein Wettbewerber einen Preis gewinnt,
wenn er hinsichtlich einer vorgegebenen Anzahl von Dimensionen besser als
seine Konkurrenten abschneidet. Es zeigt sich dabei, dass ein Turnierveranstalter,
der die Anstrengungen der Turnierteilnehmer maximieren möchte, Turniere
mit einer kleinen Anzahl von Outputdimensionen bevorzugen sollte." (Autorenreferat)

In presidential primaries, proportional campaign resource allocation to states with respect to their delegate numbers is a desirable concept. To study proportionality, we introduce a novel model for n-player multi-battle dynamic contests. We show that when players maximize their expected number of delegates there is a subgame perfect equilibrium in which players allocate their resources proportionally. However for at least 4 number of states and at least 2 delegates, when players maximize their probability of winning, there is always a distribution of delegates over the states such that population proportionality is not satisfied.

Many decisions taken in legislatures or committees are subject to lobbying efforts. A seminal contribution to the literature on vote-buying is the legislative lobbying model pioneered by Groseclose and Snyder (1996), which predicts that lobbies will optimally form supermajorities in many cases. Providing the first empirical assessment of this prominent model, we test its central predictions in the laboratory. While the model assumes sequential moves, we relax this assumption in additional treatments with simultaneous moves. We find that lobbies buy supermajorities as predicted by the theory. Our results also provide supporting evidence for most comparative statics predictions of the legislative lobbying model with respect to lobbies' willingness to pay and legislators' preferences. Most of these results carry over to the simultaneous-move set-up but the predictive power of the model declines.

Abstract
This article examines the influence of focality in Colonel Blotto games with a lottery contest success function (CSF), where the equilibrium is unique and in pure strategies. We hypothesise that the salience of battlefields affects strategic behaviour (the salient target hypothesis) and present a controlled test of this hypothesis against Nash predictions, checking the robustness of equilibrium play. When the sources of salience come from asymmetries in battlefield values or labels (as in Schelling, 1960), subjects over-allocate the resource to the salient battlefields relative to the Nash prediction. However, the effect is stronger with salient values. In the absence of salience, we find support for the Nash prediction.

When a multi-plant firm must close one unit due to declining demand it can choose between two alternatives. On the one hand, the firm can announce a certain span of time in which the plants are evaluated according to relative performance with the least performing plant being shut down in the end (shutdown contest). On the other hand, the firm can use given information on the plants' productivities and close the least productive unit. This paper analyzes the selection and incentive properties of both alternatives. Multi-plant firms often operate in an international industry. Hence, in a second step we discuss the effects of governmental support for domestic plants on selection efficiency.