EconPapers    
Economics at your fingertips  
 

Constrained contests with a continuum of battles

Sung-Ha Hwang, Youngwoo Koh and Jingfeng Lu

Games and Economic Behavior, 2023, vol. 142, issue C, 992-1011

Abstract: We study a contest problem in which two players compete on a continuum of battlefields by spending resources subject to some constraints on their strategies. Following Myerson (1993), we assume that each player's resource allocation on each battlefield is an independent random draw from the same distribution. Within each battlefield, the player who allocates a higher level of resources wins, but both players incur costs for resource allocation. To analyze this problem, we introduce a systematic way to identify equilibrium allocation strategies and show that any equilibrium strategy of a player renders the rival indifferent in terms of the “constraint-adjusted payoff”. Using this, we provide a complete characterization of equilibrium allocation strategies. We also show that whereas a symmetric budget constraint may induce players to spend more resources than in the case with no constraint, asymmetric budgets that are proportional to players' values of winning would eliminate this possibility.

Keywords: Contest; Resource allocation; Constraints; Continuum of battles; Constraint-adjusted payoffs (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2023
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0899825623001616
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:gamebe:v:142:y:2023:i:c:p:992-1011

DOI: 10.1016/j.geb.2023.10.011

Access Statistics for this article

Games and Economic Behavior is currently edited by E. Kalai

More articles in Games and Economic Behavior from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().

 
Page updated 2025-03-31
Handle: RePEc:eee:gamebe:v:142:y:2023:i:c:p:992-1011