A General Framework for Studying Contests

Spencer Bastani, Thomas Giebe and Oliver Gürtler

No 7993, CESifo Working Paper Series from CESifo

Abstract: We develop a general framework to study contests, containing the well-known models of Tullock (1980) and Lazear & Rosen (1981) as special cases. The contest outcome depends on players’ effort and skill, the latter being subject to symmetric uncertainty. The model is tractable, because a symmetric equilibrium exists under general assumptions regarding production technologies and skill distributions. We construct a link between our contest model and expected utility theory and exploit this link to revisit important comparative statics results of contest theory and show how these can be overturned. Finally, we apply our results to study optimal workforce composition.

Keywords: contest theory; symmetric equilibrium; heterogeneity; risk; decision theory (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C72 D74 D81 J23 M51 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2019
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-mic, nep-ore and nep-upt
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (3)

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Related works:
Working Paper: A General Framework for Studying Contests (2020)
Working Paper: A general framework for studying contests (2020)
Working Paper: A general framework for studying contests (2019)
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