IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/ces/ceswps/_3285.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

The Contest Winner: Gifted or Venturesome?

Author

Listed:
  • Marco Sahm

Abstract

This paper examines the chance of winning a Tullock-contest when participants differ in both their talent and their attitude towards risk. For the case of CARA preferences, it is shown that the winning probability may be higher for a low-skilled agent with a low degree of risk aversion than for a high-skilled agent with a high degree of risk-aversion. Such an outcome often is undesirable. It will occur if and only if the agents’ ratio of degrees of risk aversion is larger than their ratio of skill levels and the rent of the contest is sufficiently high.

Suggested Citation

  • Marco Sahm, 2010. "The Contest Winner: Gifted or Venturesome?," CESifo Working Paper Series 3285, CESifo Group Munich.
    • Handle: RePEc:ces:ceswps:_3285
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://www.cesifo-group.de/DocDL/cesifo1_wp3285.pdf
    Download Restriction: no

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Hans K. Hvide, 2002. "Tournament Rewards and Risk Taking," Journal of Labor Economics, University of Chicago Press, vol. 20(4), pages 877-898, October.
    2. Marco Runkel, 2006. "Optimal contest design, closeness and the contest success function," Public Choice, Springer, vol. 129(1), pages 217-231, October.
    3. Fabella, Raul V., 1992. "A note on the Tullock dissipation rate," Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization, Elsevier, vol. 19(2), pages 245-249, October.
    4. Hvide, Hans K. & Kristiansen, Eirik G., 2003. "Risk taking in selection contests," Games and Economic Behavior, Elsevier, vol. 42(1), pages 172-179, January.
    5. James W. Bono, 2008. "Sales contests, promotion decisions and heterogeneous risk," Managerial and Decision Economics, John Wiley & Sons, Ltd., vol. 29(4), pages 371-382.
    6. Runkel, Marco, 2006. "Total effort, competitive balance and the optimal contest success function," European Journal of Political Economy, Elsevier, vol. 22(4), pages 1009-1013, December.
    7. Takeshi Yamazaki, 2008. "On the Existence and Uniqueness of Pure-Strategy Nash Equilibrium in Asymmetric Rent-Seeking Contests," Journal of Public Economic Theory, Association for Public Economic Theory, vol. 10(2), pages 317-327, April.
    8. Skaperdas, Stergios & Gan, Li, 1995. "Risk Aversion in Contests," Economic Journal, Royal Economic Society, vol. 105(431), pages 951-962, July.
    9. Cornes, Richard & Hartley, Roger, 2003. "Risk Aversion, Heterogeneity and Contests," Public Choice, Springer, vol. 117(1-2), pages 1-25, October.
    10. Long, Ngo Van & Vousden, Neil J, 1987. "Risk-Averse Rent Seeking with Shared Rents," Economic Journal, Royal Economic Society, vol. 97(388), pages 971-985, December.
    11. Konrad, Kai A & Schlesinger, Harris, 1997. "Risk Aversion in Rent-Seeking and Rent-Augmenting Games," Economic Journal, Royal Economic Society, vol. 107(445), pages 1671-1683, November.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. March, Christoph & Sahm, Marco, 2017. "Asymmetric discouragement in asymmetric contests," Economics Letters, Elsevier, vol. 151(C), pages 23-27.

    More about this item

    Keywords

    selection contest; asymmetric players; risk aversion;

    JEL classification:

    • C72 - Mathematical and Quantitative Methods - - Game Theory and Bargaining Theory - - - Noncooperative Games
    • D72 - Microeconomics - - Analysis of Collective Decision-Making - - - Political Processes: Rent-seeking, Lobbying, Elections, Legislatures, and Voting Behavior

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:ces:ceswps:_3285. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: (Klaus Wohlrabe). General contact details of provider: http://edirc.repec.org/data/cesifde.html .

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    If CitEc recognized a reference but did not link an item in RePEc to it, you can help with this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service hosted by the Research Division of the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis . RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.