Winner's effort in multi-battle team contests
Stefano Barbieri and
Marco Serena
Games and Economic Behavior, 2024, vol. 145, issue C, 526-556
Abstract:
In multi-battle team contests with pairwise battles, how battles are organized—sequentially or (partially) simultaneously—may affect the expected winner's total effort (WE), a natural objective in R&D races, elections, and sports. We focus on noise (modeled via the contest success function's discriminatory power) and across-team heterogeneity, abstracting from player-specific heterogeneity. With sufficient noise, we show that: (1) If teams are symmetric, all temporal structures yield the same WE; and (2) If teams are asymmetric, WE is maximized by a fully simultaneous contest and minimized by a fully sequential one. With no noise, we show that: (3) If teams are symmetric, WE is maximized by a fully sequential contest and minimized by a fully simultaneous one; and (4) If teams are asymmetric, neither the fully sequential nor the fully simultaneous temporal structures maximize or minimize WE. Our results use a novel technique that simplifies temporal structure comparisons: extractions and mergers.
Keywords: Team contest; Winner's effort; Temporal structures; Team-asymmetry effect; Stochastic-effort effect (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C72 D72 D74 D82 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2024
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:
Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0899825624000563
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:145:y:2024:i:c:p:526-556
DOI: 10.1016/j.geb.2024.04.006
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 ().