Difference-form group contests

María Cubel () and Santiago Sanchez-Pages ()
Additional contact information
María Cubel: University of Bath
Santiago Sanchez-Pages: King’s College London

Review of Economic Design, 2025, vol. 29, issue 3, No 3, 415-446

Abstract: Abstract This paper is the first to study difference-form group contests, that is, contests fought among groups where their probability of victory depends on the absolute difference of their effective efforts. We show that key equilibrium variables in these contests can be expressed as a function of a modified version of the Watts poverty index. We use the properties of this index to study the impact of heterogeneity, both within and between groups. In the case of homogeneous groups, we show that multiple groups can be active in equilibrium and that more groups are active and aggregate effort is higher the more similar their valuations of victory are. We then characterize equilibria under heterogeneous groups. We show that within-group heterogeneity is typically detrimental to the success of a group in the contest. Groups may have an incentive to become more homogeneous in order to increase their chances of victory.

Keywords: Contests; Contest success function; Groups; Heterogeneity (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C72 D63 D72 D74 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2025
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://link.springer.com/10.1007/s10058-022-00312-8 Abstract (text/html)
Access to the full text of the articles in this series is restricted.

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:spr:reecde:v:29:y:2025:i:3:d:10.1007_s10058-022-00312-8

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.springer.com/economics/journal/10058

DOI: 10.1007/s10058-022-00312-8

Access Statistics for this article

Review of Economic Design is currently edited by Atila Abdulkadiroglu, Fuhito Kojima and Tilman Börgers

More articles in Review of Economic Design from Springer, Society for Economic Design
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().