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Samuel Häfner
Last Name
Häfner
First name
Samuel
Email
samuel.haefner@unisg.ch
ORCID
Phone
+41 71 224 2765
Now showing
1 - 10 of 10
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PublicationType: journal articleJournal: Quantitative Economics
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PublicationEternal Peace in the Tug-of-War?( 2022)The tug-of-war between single players is known to have a non-cooperative Markov-perfect equilibrium in which both players expend zero efforts and neither player drives the Markov process to one of the terminal states. We show that these peaceful outcomes vanish if the single players are replaced by teams with team members permanently assigned to the different Markov states and interacting pairwise in an all-pay auction. The reason for this phenomenon is that the members of the teams can externalize future effort costs while the single players cannot. Our analysis also highlights the impact of the discount factor on the expected trajectory of the tug-of-war, the dynamics of the expected efforts, and the degree of rent dissipation.Type: journal articleJournal: Economic Theory
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PublicationSorting in Iterated Incumbency ContestsThis paper analyzes incumbency contests in a large population setting. Incumbents repeatedly face different challengers, holding on to their positions until defeated in a contest. Defeated incumbents turn into challengers until they win a contest against an incumbent, thereby regaining an incumbency position. Individuals are heterogeneous as regards their payoffs from being incumbent. We consider steady-state equilibria and study how and to which extent individuals sort into the incumbency positions depending on their type. In particular, we identify sufficient conditions for positive sorting, meaning that types with higher incumbency payoffs are overrepresented among the incumbents, and show that negative rather than positive sorting may also arise in equilibrium when these conditions are violated. Further results show how incumbency rents, surplus and sorting are affected by the frequency at which incumbency is contested.Type: journal articleJournal: Economic Theory
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PublicationType: journal articleJournal: The RAND Journal of Economics
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PublicationStable Biased SamplingThis paper analyzes an indirect evolutionary model of sampling biases in probability estimates, which combines the sampling best response dynamics with the replicator dynamics. The arrival rate of revision opportunities in the best response dynamics is high, so that the resulting joint dynamical system is a slow-fast system and we can use Tikhonov’s theorem to study its solutions, employing practical asymptotic stability as a stability criterion. For two-strategy population games with a unique Nash equilibrium that is in mixed strategies, we find that the stable sampling bias is generically non-zero and that it is highest when the equilibrium is most asymmetric, yet that the stable sampling bias vanishes in the sample size.Type: journal articleJournal: Games and Economic BehaviorVolume: 107
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PublicationA Tug-of-War Team ContestThis paper analyzes a tug-of-war contest between two teams. In each round of the tug-of-war, a pair of agents from the opposing teams competes in a private value all-pay auction with asymmetric value distributions and effort effectiveness. Whichever team arrives first at a given lead in terms of battle victories over the opponent wins the tug-of-war. There exists a unique Markov-perfect equilibrium in bidding strategies which depend on the respective player's valuation and the current state of the tug-of-war. We derive rich comparative statics for this equilibrium by using the fact that the state of the tug-of-war evolves according to a time-homogeneous absorbing Markov chain.Type: journal articleJournal: Games and Economic BehaviorVolume: 104
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PublicationPayoff Shares in Two-Player ContestsIn imperfectly discriminating contests with symmetric valuations, equilibrium payoffs are positive shares of the value of the prize. In contrast to a bargaining situation, players’ shares sum to less than one because a residual share of the value is lost due to rent dissipation. In this paper, we consider contests with two players and investigate the relationship between these equilibrium shares and the parameters of a class of asymmetric Tullock contest success functions. Our main finding is that any players’ shares that sum up to less than one can arise as the unique outcome of a pure-strategy Nash equilibrium for appropriate parameters.Type: journal articleJournal: GamesVolume: 7Issue: 3
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PublicationType: conference speech
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PublicationType: conference speech