Behavioral variation in Tullock contests

Aidas Masiliūnas, Friederike Mengel and J. Philipp Reiss

No 55, Working Paper Series in Economics from Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT), Department of Economics and Management

Abstract: We conduct an experiment to uncover the reasons behind the typically large behavioral variation and low explanatory power of Nash equilibrium observed in Tullock contests. In our standard contest treatment, only 7% of choices are consistent with Nash equilibrium which is in line with the literature and roughly what random (uniform) choice would predict (6.25%). We consider a large class of social, risk and some other non-standard preferences and show that heterogeneity in preferences cannot explain these results. We then systematically vary the complexity of both components of Nash behaviour: (I) the difficulty to form correct beliefs and (II) the difficulty to formulate best responses. In treatments where both the difficulty of forming correct beliefs and of formulating best responses is reduced behavioural variation decreases substantially and the explanatory behaviour of Nash equilibrium increases dramatically (explaining 65% of choices with a further 20% being close to NE). Our results show that bounded rationality rather than heterogeneity in preferences is the reason behind the huge behavioral variation typically observed in Tullock contests.

Keywords: rent-seeking; contests; behavioural variation; Nash equilibrium; complexity (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C72 C91 D71 D81 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2014
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-ent, nep-gro and nep-sog
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (19)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.econstor.eu/bitstream/10419/92932/1/776943340.pdf (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:zbw:kitwps:55

DOI: 10.5445/IR/1000038522

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Working Paper Series in Economics from Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT), Department of Economics and Management Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ZBW - Leibniz Information Centre for Economics ().