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Gambling in contests

Article
Author/s: 
Christian Seel and Philipp Strack
Journal of Economic Theory
Issue number: 
5
Publisher: 
Elsevier
Year: 
2013
Journal pages: 
2033–2048
Webpage [1]
This paper presents a strategic model of risk-taking behavior in contests. Formally, we analyze an n-player winner-take-all contest in which each player decides when to stop a privately observed Brownian motion with drift. A player whose process reaches zero has to stop. The player with the highest stopping point wins. Unlike the explicit cost for a higher stopping time in a war of attrition, here, higher stopping times are riskier, because players can go bankrupt. We derive a closed-form solution of a Nash equilibrium outcome. In equilibrium, highest expected losses occur at an intermediate negative value of the drift.

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Links
[1] http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0022053113001233