The Endgame

Anurag Banerjee (), Sarit Markovich and Giulio Seccia ()
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Sarit Markovich: Kellog School of Management

No 1601, Working Papers from Nazarbayev University, Department of Economics

Abstract: On December 1st, 2009 President Obama announced that the U.S. troops would have started leaving Afghanistan on July 2011. Rather than simply waiting "the U.S. troops out," the Taliban forces responded with a spike in attacks followed by a decline as the withdrawal date approached. These, at first, counter-intuitive phenomena, are addressed by studying a two-player, zero-sum game where the duration of the strategic interaction is either known or unknown to players. We find that under known duration, players' equilibrium strategies depend on the time remaining in the game and their relative positions at that time of play. Under unknown duration the equilibrium strategies are independent of time and continuation probability. We test the model on data available for soccer matches in the major European leagues. Most importantly, we exploit a change in rule adopted by FIFA in 1998 requiring referees to publicly disclose the length of the added time at the end of the 90 minutes of play. We study how the change in rule has affected the probability of scoring both over time and across teams' relative performance and find that the rule's change led to a 28% increase in the probability of scoring during the added time.

Keywords: conflict resolution; information; soccer (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C72 D74 D83 L83 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 40 pages
Date: 2016-10
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-spo
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

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