Disclosing Effort in Dynamic Team Contests with Effort Complementarity

Maria Arbatskaya and Hideo Konishi

No 1094, Boston College Working Papers in Economics from Boston College Department of Economics

Abstract: This paper studies strategic effort disclosure in dynamic team contests. Two teams of two players compete in a Tullock contest with teammates' sequential efforts aggregated across two periods using a Cobb-Douglas production function. We examine how equilibrium efforts and winning probabilities are affected by the teams' communication policies: no communication, private communication (efforts shared internally with stage-2 teammates), and public communication (efforts disclosed to stage-2 rivals as well. To describe asymmetric information generated by privately observable efforts for each communication policy profile, we use perfect Bayesian equilibrium with an appropriate belief refinement for multi-stage complete information games. In the unique positive-effort equilibrium,the optimal choice of a communication strategy dff§ers for the favorite (the strong team) and the underdog (the weak team). Private communication only benefits the underdog team, fostering effort complementarity and improving their chances of winning and payoffs. In contrast, the favorite team prefers either public or no communication to deter rival efforts or avoid intra-team free-riding. Importantly,endogenous communication policies reshape competitive dynamics, with private disclosure of efforts serving as a strategic equalizer for weaker teams.

Keywords: team contest; complementarity in efforts; communication policy; commitment; information (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C72 D23 D74 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2025-07-21
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-mic
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://fmwww.bc.edu/EC-P/wp1094.pdf main text (application/pdf)

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:boc:bocoec:1094

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Boston College Working Papers in Economics from Boston College Department of Economics Boston College, 140 Commonwealth Avenue, Chestnut Hill MA 02467 USA. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Christopher F Baum ().