Equilibrium player choices in team contests with multiple pairwise battles

Abstract

We consider games in which team leaders strategically choose the order of players sent to the battle…eld in majoritarian team contests with multiple pairwise battles as in Fu, Lu, and Pan (2015 American Economic Review). We consider one-shot orderchoice games and battle-by-battle sequential player choice games. We show that as long as the number of players on each team is the same as the number of battles, the equilibrium winning probability of a team and the ex ante expected e¤ort of each player in a multi-battle contest are independent of whether players' assignments are one-shot or battle-by-battle sequential. This equilibrium winning probability and ex ante expected total e¤ort coincide with those where the player matching is chosen totally randomly with an equal probability lottery by the contest organizer. Finally, we show how player choices add subtleties to the equivalence result by examples.We thank Stefano Barbieri, Qiang Fu, and Jingfeng Lu for their helpful comments and encouragement. Comments and suggestions from an anonymous referee and associate editor improved the paper tremendously.