An experimental analysis of Colonel Blotto Games under alternative environments

Çınar, Yetkin; Göksel, Türkmen

doi:10.3848/iif.2012.312.3271

“…Under the lottery treatments there is support for the equilibrium prediction of a constant allocation across all battlefields for both players. Cinar and Goksel (2012) compare Colonel Blotto games with symmetric resources and asymmetric resources. They also vary the number of battlefields.…”

Section: Constant-sum Colonel Blotto Gamesmentioning

confidence: 99%

A Survey of Experimental Research on Contests, All-Pay Auctions and Tournaments

Dechenaux

¹

,

Kovenock

²

,

Sheremeta

³

2012

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Many economic, political and social environments can be described as contests in which agents exert costly efforts while competing over the distribution of a scarce resource. These environments have been studied using Tullock contests, all-pay auctions and rank-order tournaments. This survey provides a comprehensive review of experimental research on these three canonical contests. First, we review studies investigating the basic structure of contests, including the number of players and prizes, spillovers and externalities, heterogeneity, risk and incomplete information. Second, we discuss dynamic contests and multi-battle contests. Then we review studies examining sabotage, feedback, bias, collusion, alliances, group contests and gender, as well as field experiments. Finally, we discuss applications of contests and suggest directions for future research. IntroductionMany economic, political and social environments can be described as contests in which competing agents have the opportunity to expend scarce resources -such as effort, money, time, or troops -in order to affect the probabilities of winning prizes. Examples range from the competition for mates, college admission, patents, or promotions within firms, to the process of litigation or lobbying politicians, to elections, sports competitions, and violent global conflicts (Tullock, 1967;Krueger, 1974). As is obvious from this list, these environments have attracted considerable attention in applications in a wide range of fields, both in-and out-side of economics. They have also been studied extensively by economic theorists in what has become known as the field of contest theory (Konrad, 2009). Although this field continues to attract many young theorists, it has its roots in three models developed in the mid-seventies to early eighties: the Tullock (1980) model of rent-seeking, the Lazear and Rosen (1981) rank-order tournament model, and the all-pay auction (Hirshleifer and Riley, 1978;Nalebuff and Stiglitz, 1983;Dasgupta, 1986;Hillman and Riley, 1989). Despite the fact that the three models historically developed somewhat independently, they represent special cases of a general contest model that can be formulated in a unified framework.Despite an extensive and established theoretical literature, much less effort has been devoted to empirically investigate individual behavior in different contests and compare such behavior with theoretical predictions. The main reason is that it is not trivial to measure individual effort in the field since the researcher can only observe the performance of contestants, which is a function of effort, ability and luck (Ericsson and Charness, 1994). The majority of empirical studies use either firm level data (Prendergast, 1999) or sports data (Szymanski, 2003). Because it is typically difficult to measure the actual effort expended by players in the field, almost all of these studies focus solely on investigating whether the pattern of outcomes is consistent with the theoretical predictions.Controlled experimen...

show abstract

“…Several existing contributions employ an auction contest success function to determine the winner of each battlefield. Some of these reward subjects based on the total number or value of battlefields won (Avrahami and Kareev, 2009;Arad and Rubinstein, 2012;Cinar et al, 2012;Chowdhury et al, 2013). Others reward subjects who win either a majority of the battlefields or more than half of the total value of battlefields (Arad, 2012;Montero et al, 2016;Mago and Sheremeta, 2012).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Focality and Asymmetry in Multi-Battle Contests

Chowdhury

¹

,

Kovenock

²

,

Arjona

³

et al. 2020

The Economic Journal

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

This article examines the influence of focality in Colonel Blotto games with a lottery contest success function, where the equilibrium is unique and in pure strategies. We hypothesize that the salience of battlefields affects strategic behaviour (the salient target hypothesis) and present a controlled test of this hypothesis against Nash predictions, checking the robustness of equilibrium play. When the sources of salience come from asymmetries in battlefield values or labels (as in Schelling, 1960), subjects over-allocate the resource to the salient battlefields relative to the Nash prediction. However, the effect is stronger with salient values. In the absence of salience, we find support for the Nash prediction.

show abstract

A survey of experimental research on contests, all-pay auctions and tournaments

Dechenaux

¹

,

Kovenock

²

,

Sheremeta

³

2014

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Many economic, political and social environments can be described as contests in which agents exert costly efforts while competing over the distribution of a scarce resource. These environments have been studied using Tullock contests, all-pay auctions and rank-order tournaments. This survey provides a review of experimental research on these three canonical contests. First, we review studies investigating the basic structure of contests, including the contest success function, number of players and prizes, spillovers and externalities, heterogeneity, and incomplete information. Second, we discuss dynamic contests and multibattle contests. Then we review research on sabotage, feedback, bias, collusion, alliances, and contests between groups, as well as real-effort and field experiments. Finally, we discuss applications of contests to the study of legal systems, political competition, war, conflict avoidance, sales, and charities, and suggest directions for future research.

show abstract

An experimental analysis of Colonel Blotto Games under alternative environments

Cited by 6 publications

References 4 publications

A Survey of Experimental Research on Contests, All-Pay Auctions and Tournaments

A Survey of Experimental Research on Contests, All-Pay Auctions and Tournaments

Focality and Asymmetry in Multi-Battle Contests

A survey of experimental research on contests, all-pay auctions and tournaments

Contact Info

Product

Resources

About