{"title":"Multi-battle contests over complementary battlefields","authors":"Daniel Stephenson","doi":"10.1007/s10058-024-00351-3","DOIUrl":null,"url":null,"abstract":"<p>This paper studies contests with complementary prizes where each agent simultaneously distributes a fixed budget over multiple battlefields. Each battlefield has a single prize which is divided among the competitors in proportion to an arbitrary power function of their investment levels. A unique pure strategy Nash equilibrium is shown to exist under arbitrarily sensitive battlefield success functions if objective functions exhibit constant subunitary elasticity of substitution between prize shares. In contrast, Blotto contests with linear objectives have only mixed strategy Nash equilibria if battlefield success functions are sufficiently sensitive to investment levels. Sufficient complementarity between prize shares allows pure strategy Nash equilibria to exist under arbitrarily sensitive battlefield success functions.</p>","PeriodicalId":44537,"journal":{"name":"Review of Economic Design","volume":"6 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.3000,"publicationDate":"2024-04-09","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":"0","resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":null,"PeriodicalName":"Review of Economic Design","FirstCategoryId":"96","ListUrlMain":"https://doi.org/10.1007/s10058-024-00351-3","RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"经济学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":null,"EPubDate":"","PubModel":"","JCR":"Q4","JCRName":"ECONOMICS","Score":null,"Total":0}
引用次数: 0
Abstract
This paper studies contests with complementary prizes where each agent simultaneously distributes a fixed budget over multiple battlefields. Each battlefield has a single prize which is divided among the competitors in proportion to an arbitrary power function of their investment levels. A unique pure strategy Nash equilibrium is shown to exist under arbitrarily sensitive battlefield success functions if objective functions exhibit constant subunitary elasticity of substitution between prize shares. In contrast, Blotto contests with linear objectives have only mixed strategy Nash equilibria if battlefield success functions are sufficiently sensitive to investment levels. Sufficient complementarity between prize shares allows pure strategy Nash equilibria to exist under arbitrarily sensitive battlefield success functions.
期刊介绍:
Review of Economic Design comprises the creative art and science of inventing, analyzing and testing economic as well as social and political institutions and mechanisms aimed at achieving individual objectives and social goals. In this age of Economic Design, the accumulated traditions and wealth of knowledge in normative and positive economics and the strategic analysis of game theory are applied with novel ideas in the creative tasks of designing and assembling diverse legal-economic instruments. These include constitutions and other assignments of rights, mechanisms for allocation or regulation, tax and incentive schemes, contract forms, voting and other choice aggregation procedures, markets, auctions, organizational forms, such as partnerships, together with supporting membership and other property rights, and information systems. These designs, the methods of analysis used in their scrutiny, as well as the mathematical techniques and empirical knowledge they employ, along with comparative assessments of the performance of known economic systems and implemented designs, all of these form natural components of the subject matter of Economic Design.
Officially cited as: Rev Econ Design