Across many forms of rent seeking contests, the impact of risk aversion on equilibrium play is indeterminate. We design an experiment to compare individuals' decisions across three contests which are isomorphic under risk-neutrality, but are typically not isomorphic under other risk preferences. The pattern of individual play across our contests is not consistent with a Bayes-Nash equilibrium for any distribution of risk preferences. We show that replacing the Bayes-Nash equilibrium concept with the quantal response equilibrium, along with heterogeneous risk preferences can produce equilibrium patterns of play that are very similar to the patterns we observe. Acknowledgements:The authors thank Charissa Wellford for her comments and suggestions. We thank the Indiana University Department of Economics for funding this project. Schmidt is an employee of the Federal Trade Commission, but the views expressed in this paper are those of the authors and do not necessarily represent the views of the Federal Trade Commission or any individual Commissioner.

Across many forms of rent seeking contests, the impact of risk aversion on equilibrium play is indeterminate. We design an experiment to compare individuals' decisions across three contests which are isomorphic under risk-neutrality, but are typically not isomorphic under other risk preferences. The pattern of individual play across our contests is not consistent with a Bayes-Nash equilibrium for any distribution of risk preferences. We show that replacing the Bayes-Nash equilibrium concept with the quantal response equilibrium, along with heterogeneous risk preferences can produce equilibrium patterns of play that are very similar to the patterns we observe. Acknowledgements:The authors thank Charissa Wellford for her comments and suggestions. We thank the Indiana University Department of Economics for funding this project. Schmidt is an employee of the Federal Trade Commission, but the views expressed in this paper are those of the authors and do not necessarily represent the views of the Federal Trade Commission or any individual Commissioner.

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