IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/eee/jeborg/v89y2013icp9-22.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

Contests with group-specific public goods and complementarities in efforts

Author

Listed:
  • Kolmar, Martin
  • Rommeswinkel, Hendrik

Abstract

This paper starts from the observation that in public-goods group contests, group impact can in general not be additively decomposed into some sum (of functions) of individual efforts. We use a CES-impact function to identify the main channels of influence of the elasticity of substitution on the behavior in and the outcome of such a contest. We characterize the Nash equilibria of this game and carry out comparative-static exercises with respect to the elasticity of substitution among group members’ efforts. If groups are homogeneous (i.e. all group members have the same valuation and efficiency within the group), the elasticity of substitution has no effect on the equilibrium. For heterogeneous groups, the higher the complementarity of efforts of that group, the lower the divergence of efforts among group members and the lower the winning probability of that group. This contradicts the common intuition that groups can improve their performance by solving the free-rider problem via higher degrees of complementarity of efforts.

Suggested Citation

  • Kolmar, Martin & Rommeswinkel, Hendrik, 2013. "Contests with group-specific public goods and complementarities in efforts," Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization, Elsevier, vol. 89(C), pages 9-22.
    • Handle: RePEc:eee:jeborg:v:89:y:2013:i:c:p:9-22
    DOI: 10.1016/j.jebo.2013.02.006
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0167268113000334
    Download Restriction: Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only
    File URL: https://libkey.io/10.1016/j.jebo.2013.02.006?utm_source=ideas
    LibKey link: if access is restricted and if your library uses this service, LibKey will redirect you to where you can use your library subscription to access this item
    ---><---

    As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to search for a different version of it.

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Alchian, Armen A & Demsetz, Harold, 1972. "Production , Information Costs, and Economic Organization," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 62(5), pages 777-795, December.
    2. Konrad, Kai A., 2009. "Strategy and Dynamics in Contests," OUP Catalogue, Oxford University Press, number 9780199549603.
    3. Chowdhury, Subhasish M. & Lee, Dongryul & Sheremeta, Roman M., 2013. "Top guns may not fire: Best-shot group contests with group-specific public good prizes," Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization, Elsevier, vol. 92(C), pages 94-103.
    4. Richard Cornes, 1993. "Dyke Maintenance and Other Stories: Some Neglected Types of Public Goods," The Quarterly Journal of Economics, President and Fellows of Harvard College, vol. 108(1), pages 259-271.
    5. Nitzan, Shmuel, 1991. "Rent-Seeking with Non-identical Sharing Rules," Public Choice, Springer, vol. 71(1-2), pages 43-50, August.
    6. Shmuel Nitzan, 2008. "Collective Rent Dissipation," Springer Books, in: Roger D. Congleton & Arye L. Hillman & Kai A. Konrad (ed.), 40 Years of Research on Rent Seeking 1, pages 309-321, Springer.
    7. Cornes, Richard & Hartley, Roger, 2007. "Weak links, good shots and other public good games: Building on BBV," Journal of Public Economics, Elsevier, vol. 91(9), pages 1684-1707, September.
    8. Debraj Ray & Jean-Marie Baland & Olivier Dagnelie, 2007. "Inequality and Inefficiency in Joint Projects," Economic Journal, Royal Economic Society, vol. 117(522), pages 922-935, July.
    9. Arye L. Hillman & John G. Riley, 1989. "Politically Contestable Rents And Transfers," Economics and Politics, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 1(1), pages 17-39, March.
    10. Luis Garicano & Tano Santos, 2004. "Referrals," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 94(3), pages 499-525, June.
    11. Johannes Münster, 2009. "Group contest success functions," Economic Theory, Springer;Society for the Advancement of Economic Theory (SAET), vol. 41(2), pages 345-357, November.
    12. Warneryd, Karl, 2001. "Replicating contests," Economics Letters, Elsevier, vol. 71(3), pages 323-327, June.
    13. Ryvkin, Dmitry, 2011. "The optimal sorting of players in contests between groups," Games and Economic Behavior, Elsevier, vol. 73(2), pages 564-572.
    14. Katz, Eliakim & Nitzan, Shmuel & Rosenberg, Jacob, 1990. "Rent-Seeking for Pure Public Goods," Public Choice, Springer, vol. 65(1), pages 49-60, April.
    15. Gil S. Epstein & Yosef Mealem, 2009. "Group Specific Public Goods, Orchestration of Interest Groups and Free Riding," Working Papers 2009-02, Bar-Ilan University, Department of Economics.
    16. Richard Cornes & Roger Hartley, 2005. "Asymmetric contests with general technologies," Economic Theory, Springer;Society for the Advancement of Economic Theory (SAET), vol. 26(4), pages 923-946, November.
    17. Stein, William E, 2002. "Asymmetric Rent-Seeking with More Than Two Contestants," Public Choice, Springer, vol. 113(3-4), pages 325-336, December.
    18. Gil Epstein & Yosef Mealem, 2009. "Group specific public goods, orchestration of interest groups with free riding," Public Choice, Springer, vol. 139(3), pages 357-369, June.
    19. Nitzan, Shmuel & Ueda, Kaoru, 2009. "Collective contests for commons and club goods," Journal of Public Economics, Elsevier, vol. 93(1-2), pages 48-55, February.
    20. Garfinkel, Michelle R. & Skaperdas, Stergios, 2007. "Economics of Conflict: An Overview," Handbook of Defense Economics, in: Keith Hartley & Todd Sandler (ed.), Handbook of Defense Economics, edition 1, volume 2, chapter 22, pages 649-709, Elsevier.
    21. Jack Hirshleifer, 1983. "From weakest-link to best-shot: The voluntary provision of public goods," Public Choice, Springer, vol. 41(3), pages 371-386, January.
    22. Lee, Dongryul, 2012. "Weakest-link contests with group-specific public good prizes," European Journal of Political Economy, Elsevier, vol. 28(2), pages 238-248.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Most related items

    These are the items that most often cite the same works as this one and are cited by the same works as this one.
    1. Martin Kolmar & Hendrik Rommeswinkel, 2010. "Group Contests with Complementarities in Efforts," CESifo Working Paper Series 3136, CESifo.
    2. Dongryul Lee & Joon Song, 2019. "Optimal Team Contests to Induce More Efforts," Journal of Sports Economics, , vol. 20(3), pages 448-476, April.
    3. Cheikbossian, Guillaume, 2021. "Evolutionarily stable in-group altruism in intergroup conflict over (local) public goods," Games and Economic Behavior, Elsevier, vol. 127(C), pages 206-226.
    4. Arye L. Hillman & Ngo Van Long, 2017. "Rent Seeking: The Social Cost of Contestable Benefits," CESifo Working Paper Series 6462, CESifo.
    5. Dongryul Lee & Pilwon Kim, 2022. "Group formation in a dominance-seeking contest," Social Choice and Welfare, Springer;The Society for Social Choice and Welfare, vol. 58(1), pages 39-68, January.
    6. Arye Hillman & Ngo Van Long, 2017. "The social cost of contestable benefits," CIRANO Working Papers 2017s-11, CIRANO.
    7. Brookins, Philip & Lightle, John P. & Ryvkin, Dmitry, 2015. "Optimal sorting in group contests with complementarities," Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization, Elsevier, vol. 112(C), pages 311-323.
    8. Baik, Kyung Hwan & Jung, Hanjoon Michael, 2021. "Contests with multiple alternative prizes: Public-good/bad prizes and externalities," Journal of Mathematical Economics, Elsevier, vol. 92(C), pages 103-116.
    9. Martin Kolmar & Hendrik Rommeswinkel, 2020. "Group size and group success in conflicts," Social Choice and Welfare, Springer;The Society for Social Choice and Welfare, vol. 55(4), pages 777-822, December.
    10. Johannes Münster, 2009. "Group contest success functions," Economic Theory, Springer;Society for the Advancement of Economic Theory (SAET), vol. 41(2), pages 345-357, November.
    11. Subhasish M. Chowdhury & Dongryul Lee & Iryna Topolyan, 2013. "The Max-Min Group Contest," University of East Anglia Applied and Financial Economics Working Paper Series 050, School of Economics, University of East Anglia, Norwich, UK..
    12. Roman M. Sheremeta, 2018. "Behavior In Group Contests: A Review Of Experimental Research," Journal of Economic Surveys, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 32(3), pages 683-704, July.
    13. Martin Kolmar & Hendrik Rommeswinkel, 2011. "Technological Determinants of the Group-Size Paradox," CESifo Working Paper Series 3362, CESifo.
    14. Subhasish M. Chowdhury & Dongryul Lee & Iryna Topolyan, 2016. "The Max‐Min Group Contest: Weakest‐link (Group) All‐Pay Auction," Southern Economic Journal, John Wiley & Sons, vol. 83(1), pages 105-125, July.
    15. Shmuel Nitzan & Kaoru Ueda, 2014. "Intra-group heterogeneity in collective contests," Social Choice and Welfare, Springer;The Society for Social Choice and Welfare, vol. 43(1), pages 219-238, June.
    16. Send, Jonas, 2020. "Conflict between non-exclusive groups," Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization, Elsevier, vol. 177(C), pages 858-874.
    17. Shmuel Nitzan & Kaoru Ueda, 2018. "Selective incentives and intragroup heterogeneity in collective contests," Journal of Public Economic Theory, Association for Public Economic Theory, vol. 20(4), pages 477-498, August.
    18. Dripto Bakshi & Indraneel Dasgupta, 2021. "A Subscription vs. Appropriation Framework for Natural Resource Conflicts," World Scientific Book Chapters, in: Anil Markandya & Dirk Rübbelke (ed.), CLIMATE AND DEVELOPMENT, chapter 9, pages 257-307, World Scientific Publishing Co. Pte. Ltd..
    19. Jay Pil Choi & Subhasish M. Chowdhury & Jaesoo Kim, 2016. "Group Contests with Internal Conflict and Power Asymmetry," Scandinavian Journal of Economics, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 118(4), pages 816-840, October.
    20. Subhasish M. Chowdhury & Iryna Topolyan, 2015. "The Group All-Pay Auction with Heterogeneous Impact Functions," University of East Anglia Applied and Financial Economics Working Paper Series 069, School of Economics, University of East Anglia, Norwich, UK..

    More about this item

    Keywords

    Contests; Public Goods; Complementarities;
    All these keywords.

    JEL classification:

    • C72 - Mathematical and Quantitative Methods - - Game Theory and Bargaining Theory - - - Noncooperative Games
    • D74 - Microeconomics - - Analysis of Collective Decision-Making - - - Conflict; Conflict Resolution; Alliances; Revolutions
    • H41 - Public Economics - - Publicly Provided Goods - - - Public Goods

    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:eee:jeborg:v:89:y:2013:i:c:p:9-22. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    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 bibliographic 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.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Catherine Liu (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://www.elsevier.com/locate/jebo .

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

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.