Suchergebnisse

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.

"In diesem Aufsatz werden die Eigenschaften von independent-private-value all-pay- und winner-pay-Auktionen untersucht, bei denen jeweils mehrere Einheiten verkauft werden. Es wird das Gebots-Verhalten, die Effizienz und der Erlös in einem Set von neun Experimenten mit je sechs Teilnehmern betrachtet. In sechs Experimenten werden all-pay-Auktionen durchgeführt, wovon in drei Durchgängen je vier Einheiten und in der anderen drei je zwei Einheiten versteigert werden. In den drei restlichen Experimenten werden winner-pay-Auktionen durchgeführt, wobei je vier Einheiten versteigert werden. Das Experiment zeigt, daß all-pay- und winner-pay-Auktionen ähnliche Erlöse erzielen, die jedoch höher sind als der im Bayesianischem Gleichgewicht mit risikoneutralen Bietern spieltheoretisch vorausgesagte Gewinn. Bei all-pay-Auktionen ist der Erlös höher, wenn K=2 als im Fall K=4, während die theoretisch berechneten Gleichgewichtserlöse in beiden identisch sind. Diese Ergebnisse legen nahe, daß winner-pay-Auktionen eher zu einer Pareto-effizienten Allokation führen als all-pay-Auktionen." (Autorenreferat)

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)

"This article examines behavior in the two-player, constant-sum Colonel Blotto game with asymmetric resources in which players maximize the expected number of battlefields won. The experimental results support all major theoretical predictions. In the auction treatment, where winning a battlefield is deterministic, disadvantaged players use a 'guerilla warfare' strategy which stochastically allocates zero resources to a subset of battlefields. Advantaged players employ a 'stochastic complete coverage' strategy, allocating random, but positive, resource levels across the battlefields. In the lottery treatment, where winning a battlefield is probabilistic, both players divide their resources equally across all battlefields." (author's abstract)

"This paper presents a unified framework for characterizing symmetric equilibrium in simultaneous move, two-player, rank-order contests with complete information, in which each player's strategy generates direct or indirect affine 'spillover' effects that depend on the rank-order of her decision variable. These effects arise in natural interpretations of a number of important economic environments, as well as in classic contests adapted to recent experimental and behavioral models where individuals exhibit inequality aversion or regret. We provide the closed-form solution for the symmetric Nash equilibria of this class of games, and show how it can be used to directly solve for equilibrium behavior in auctions, pricing games, tournaments, R&D races, models of litigation, and a host of other contests." (author's abstract)

"A simple action-theoretic framework is used to examine symmetric litigation environments where the legal ownership of a disputed asset is unknown by the court. The court observes only the quality of the case presented by each party, and awards the asset to the party presenting the best case. Rational litigants influence the quality of their cases by hiring skillful attorneys. This framework permits us to compare the equilibrium legal expenditures that arise under a continuum of legal systems. The British rule, American rule, and some recently proposed legal reforms are special cases of our model." (author's abstract)