Strategy and Dynamics in Contests

This book describes the theory structure underlying contests in which players expend effort and/or spend money in trying to get ahead of one another. Uniquely this effort is sunk and cannot be recovered regardless of whether a player wins or loses in the competition. Such interactions include diverse phenomena such as marketing and advertising by firms litigation relative reward schemes in firms political competition patent races sports military combat war and civil war. These have been studied in the field of contest theory both within these specific contexts and at a higher level of abstraction.