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Firms often use crowdsourcing contests to develop marketing ideas and solutions. Despite the prevalence—and unique aspects—of marketing ideation crowdsourcing contests (MICCs), there has been little examination of these contests' shareholder wealth implications. Adopting a signaling perspective, the authors conduct an event study of 508 MICC announcements and find that they are associated with higher returns, but also higher idiosyncratic risk, indicating that investors hold a mixed view of such contests. Further, the authors consider how contest design factors and firm marketing resources may signal the cultivation of intellectual and relational market-based assets to shape their stock market impact, providing firms guidance to better design their MICCs. Specifically, they find that returns are enhanced when firms use professional (vs. general public) contests, specifically scoped contests, and contests using crowd judging (vs. expert panels), and for firms with stronger marketing capabilities. However, brand factors have mixed effects on returns, with a brand's relevant stature having a positive effect and its energized differentiation having a negative effect on returns. Product MICCs and generally scoped contests heighten the negative effects on risk, whereas marketing resources have no impact. Results offer implications for practitioners, including the finding that many MICC design choices commonly used in practice (i.e., general public contests and expert panels) are viewed less favorably by investors. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We study the Tullock contest model with loss aversion and endogenously formed reference points. In a contest with n possibly heterogeneous players and convex effort costs, we establish sufficient conditions for a unique Nash equilibrium in pure strategies. Subsequently, we analyze the impact of loss aversion on players' spending behavior, probability of winning, and rent dissipation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study addresses the emergence of (unarmed) peace and investments in arms within a guns-vs-butter conflict setting. We introduce a novel feature within the conflict game and separate the decision to start a conflict and the investment in arms, following the theoretical framework of Garfinkel and Syropoulos (2021). Based on this model we experimentally examine the emergence of peace while varying resource inequality among conflicting parties. We find that inequality leads to more conflicts and higher investments in arms. Despite these trends, achieving a state of unarmed peace is rarely observed in both treatments. Our results highlight the critical role of trust in attaining peaceful outcomes and show that armed peace, although not an optimal strategy in either treatment, is one of the most frequently chosen decisions. • We investigate conflict and arming decisions in a novel guns-vs-butter setting. • We test the effect of resource inequality on decisions toward and in conflicts. • Inequality leads to more conflicts and higher investments in arms. • A state of unarmed peace is rarely observed, while armed peace occurs frequently. • Trust is identified as a key factor influencing decisions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents and solves a model of third-party intervention in rent-seeking contests. Two players are engaged in a rent-seeking contest, while each of the two players can be supported by a third party. In return, the third party receives a share of the prize if the supported player wins. I use this model to discuss how equilibrium behavior depends on the sharing rule between the third party and the supported player. Among others, I find that a third party may have an incentive to increase support despite a reduction of his share of the prize. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We study the rent‐seeking phenomenon using a simple, static general equilibrium model. The economy consists of two sectors, both employing a constant returns‐to‐scale technology with labor as its sole input. One of the sectors is a monopoly, where a continuum of agents compete for a share of monopoly profits (i.e. rent). Agents are heterogeneous in labor productivity and rent‐seeking ability: they face a choice between engaging in (productive) work or vying for a share of the rent (i.e., a contest against other rent‐seekers). At the aggregate level, rent‐seeking reduces the available amount of labor in the economy and thereby lowers output and welfare (rent‐seeking is inefficient). At the individual level, rent‐seeking shifts income towards rent‐seekers. Consequently, an economy with few rent‐seekers tends to have high income inequality: an effect that is exacerbated by the fact that rent is decreasing in the number of rent‐seekers (low levels of rent‐seeking increase inequity). This tradeoff between efficiency and equity is the primary focus of this paper. We investigate how the distribution of rent‐seeking ability and the correlation between labor productivity and rent‐seeking ability shape this tradeoff. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We analyze contests in which teams compete to win indivisible homogeneous prizes. Teams are composed of members who may differ in their ability, and who exert effort to increase the success of their team. Each team member can obtain at most one prize as a reward. As effort is costly, teams use the allocation of prizes to give incentives and solve the free-riding problem. We develop a two-stage game. First, teams select a prize-allocation rule. Then, team members exert effort. Members take into account how their effort and the allocation rule influence the chance they receive a prize. We prove the existence and uniqueness of equilibrium. We characterize the optimal prize-assignment rule and individual and aggregate efforts. We then show that the optimal assignment rule is generally not monotonic. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We explore the use of movable automata in numerical modelling of male competition for territory. We used territorial dragonflies as our biological inspiration for the model, assuming two types of competing males: (a) faster and larger males that adopt a face‐off strategy and repulse other males; (b) slower and smaller males that adopt a non‐aggressive strategy. The faster and larger males have higher noise intensity, leading to faster motion and longer conservation of motion direction. The velocity distributions resemble the Maxwell distributions of velocity, expected in Brownian dynamics, with two probable velocities and distribution widths for the two animal subpopulations. The fast animals' trajectories move between visually fixed density folds of the slower animal subpopulation. A correlation is found between individual velocity and individual area distribution, with smaller animals concentrated in a region of small velocities and areas. Attraction between animals results in a modification of the system behaviour, with larger animals spending more time being surrounded by smaller animals and being slowed down by their interaction with the surroundings. Overall, the study provides insights into the dynamics of animal competition for territory and the impact of attraction between animals. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We study a contest where there are two active players in equilibrium when three players expend effort simultaneously to win a prize. We look at how endogenous timing of effort exertion affects the players' behavior. The players play the following game. First, they announce simultaneously whether they each will expend effort in period 1 or in period 2. Then, after knowing when they expend effort, each player expends effort in the period which he announced. We find interesting results, focusing on the players' decisions on when to expend effort, the identities of active players, and the effort levels in a subgame‐perfect equilibrium. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The moorland plateau is the defining landscape of the North York Moors National Park in England. It reflects the everyday management decisions of land managers and the complex web of power relations between multiple stakeholders. The moorland is a contested, shared space that poses questions over access, habitat conservation, biodiversity, grouse shooting, land management, and ultimately, the purpose of National Park landscapes. This article draws upon a mixed methods approach and a heritage-landscape perspective to analyse community viewpoints of the management, use, and ownership of this landscape and to demonstrate how power relations frame human-nature synergies in the Park. In doing so, the article highlights new ways that North York Moors communities could be better represented in discussions on how landscapes are perceived, valued, and managed. It proposes a system that amalgamates key decision makers and residents and, therefore, involves a wider range of stakeholders in the landscape decision-making process. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In group-living animals, between-group relations are often revealed during intergroup encounters, which may be intolerant (competitive), affiliative (cooperative) or neutral. We investigated factors that predict different encounter types in blue monkeys, Cercopithecus mitis stuhlmanni , where intolerant encounters predominate but neutral encounters also occur. Using data from nine groups monitored over 24 months in equatorial forest, we first examined whether availability of fruit, a preferred and important food, predicted encounter rates. Fruit availability related positively only to the rate of intolerant encounters, suggesting that energetic costs of aggression and attractiveness of large fruiting trees influence contest rates. We then examined how fruit availability and time of day influenced the odds of intolerant versus neutral encounters, finding no evidence for an effect. We examined additional social factors for a subset of encounters between groups with well-known histories. The odds of intolerant versus neutral encounters declined when group sizes were more disparate and when groups had split from each other longer ago. We found no evidence that the odds of intolerant intergroup encounters were related to the proportion of females with infants or the encounter's location on edge–centre axes for both groups. Finally, we examined how ecological and social factors predicted group behaviour (aggressive, fleeing, neutral) during encounters. Encounter location, group size, group size differential and the time since two interacting groups split from each other all influenced group behaviour. Unexpectedly, aggressive behaviour was less likely at the start and end of the day. There was no evidence for an effect of fruit availability. Overall, while some evidence implicated ecological factors affecting rates of intolerant encounters, social factors seemed more important in predicting intolerant versus neutral encounters and aggressive or fleeing versus neutral group behaviour. More detailed measures of contested resources may improve evaluation of ecological effects on types of intergroup encounters. • Blue monkeys exhibit both intolerant and neutral intergroup encounters. • Monthly rates of intolerant encounters increased with fruit availability. • Odds of intolerant encounters reflected group size differences and shared histories. • Group behaviour reflected location, time of day, group size and group history. • Intergroup relations are affected by both ecological and social factors. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recently a framework was developed for aggregative variational inequalities by means of the Selten–Szidarovszky technique. By referring to this framework, a powerful Nash equilibrium uniqueness theorem for sum-aggregative games is derived. Payoff functions are strictly quasi-concave in own strategies but may be discontinuous at the origin. Its power is illustrated by reproducing and generalising in a few lines an equilibrium uniqueness result in Corchón and Torregrosa (2020) for Cournot oligopolies with the Bulow–Pfleiderer price function. Another illustration addresses an asymmetric contest with endogenous valuations in Hirai and Szidarovszky (2013). • Selten–Szidarovszky technique. • Aggregative games. • Nash equilibrium uniqueness. • Generalised convexity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper considers the issue of balancing, i.e., forming an alliance against a superpower, by adopting a contest theory which is widely used in rational choice approach to international relations. The main result is that member states increase their military spending rather than reduce it after they choose balancing, implying that diffusion of responsibility does not occur in equilibrium after balancing. This is because the alliance requires more military spending to respond optimally against the increase in military spending of the unipole as a response to the alliance formation. This paper also shows that more than one state facing against a superpower always prefers balancing by joining in an alliance despite the resulting increase in its military expenditures. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

• In contests, overbidding is widespread. • Group identity can alleviate overbidding. • Frontal lobes activated pre-group identity task, increased right temporal lobe activation post-task. • Functional connectivity in social brain regions changes before and after the group identity task. Contests may be highly effective in eliciting high levels of effort, but they also carry the risk of inefficient resource allocation due to excessive effort (overbidding), squandering valuable social resources. While a growing body of research has focused on how group identity exacerbates out-group conflict, its influence on in-group conflict remains relatively unexplored. This study endeavors to explore the impact of group identity on conflicts within and between groups in competitive environments, thereby addressing gaps in the current research landscape and dissecting the involved neurobiological mechanisms. By employing source localization and functional connectivity techniques, our research aims to identify the brain regions involved in competitive decision-making and group identity processes, as well as the functional connectivities between social brain areas. The results of our investigation revealed that participants exhibited activation in the bilateral frontal and prefrontal lobes during the bidding behavior before the group identity task. Subsequently, after the task, additional activation was observed in the right temporal lobe. Results from functional connectivity studies indicated that group identity tasks modify decision-making processes by promoting group norms, empathy, and blurred self-other boundaries for in-group decisions, while out-group decisions after the group identity task see heightened cognitive control, an increased dependence on rational judgment, introspection of self-environment relationships, and a greater focus on anticipating others' behaviors. This study reveals the widespread occurrence of overbidding behavior and demonstrates the role of group identity in mitigating this phenomenon, concurrently providing a comprehensive analysis of the underlying neural mechanisms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Most animal behaviors show large within- and among-individual variation, and this includes competitive male behaviors. With male fighting for example, aggressiveness often correlates with dominance, and contest duration varies with age. However, few studies have directly quantified how mean aggressiveness and contest duration, the variation among individuals in both traits, and the relationship among them, vary with age. Here we address these gaps and examine the effect of male age and genotype on two key aspects of male fighting behavior - aggressiveness (here measured as latency to fight) and contest duration - and the relationship between them. We do this using isogenic lines of the broad-horned flour beetle Gnatocerus cornutus. We observed fighting behavior of paired males of similar body size and age. Using uni- and multivariate mixed models, we show that although there was a significant difference between younger and older males in contest duration, mean aggressiveness was not affected by male age. However, the variation in aggression and fight duration varied with age, being greater in younger and older males respectively. Additionally, although there was a positive correlation between aggressiveness and contest duration in younger males, this relationship was not found in older males. Finally, the only significant genetic effect was for aggression in younger males. Our study shows that age differentially shapes key components of male fighting behavior as well as the relationship among them, highlighting the dynamic nature and context-dependence of fighting.Significance statement: We examined the effect of male age and genotype on two key aspects of male fighting behavior - aggressiveness (here measured as latency to fight) and contest duration - and the relationship between them. Importantly, we provide statistical methods that enable untangling these effects that will be useful to others. We used isogenic lines of the broad-horned flour beetle Gnatocerus cornutus, and observed fighting behavior of paired males of similar body size and age. We show that age differentially shapes key components of male fighting behavior as well as the relationship among them, and only find genetic effects for aggression in younger males. These novel results highlight the context dependent nature of fighting. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract We explore the use of movable automata in numerical modelling of male competition for territory. We used territorial dragonflies as our biological inspiration for the model, assuming two types of competing males: (a) faster and larger males that adopt a face‐off strategy and repulse other males; (b) slower and smaller males that adopt a non‐aggressive strategy. The faster and larger males have higher noise intensity, leading to faster motion and longer conservation of motion direction. The velocity distributions resemble the Maxwell distributions of velocity, expected in Brownian dynamics, with two probable velocities and distribution widths for the two animal subpopulations. The fast animals' trajectories move between visually fixed density folds of the slower animal subpopulation. A correlation is found between individual velocity and individual area distribution, with smaller animals concentrated in a region of small velocities and areas. Attraction between animals results in a modification of the system behaviour, with larger animals spending more time being surrounded by smaller animals and being slowed down by their interaction with the surroundings. Overall, the study provides insights into the dynamics of animal competition for territory and the impact of attraction between animals.

Development in the field of science and technology has driven advancements in medical treatment. However, these advancements do not necessarily diminish the existence of local medicine. As seen in Jalange, Barru Regency, Indonesia, Sanro medicine persists as a traditional treatment alongside modern medical civilization. This research employs a historical-discontinuous approach using Michel Foucault’s concept of the archaeology of knowledge. Data is collected through heuristic, interpretation, historiography, and criticism stages, with a focus on the years 2005 to 2021. The study reveals that Sanro medicine in the Jalange community contests modern medicine, existing through the discourse of local knowledge as its foundation. The treatment methods employed vary depending on the type of disease. Disease names are understood within their community texts, such as Bempalureng, Sarampa, Puru-puru Api (a category of skin diseases that frequently affect the local community), difficulties in childbirth, toothache, and Co’Coereng (accompanied by supernatural beings). Healing is performed through prayers in the Bugis language and the Qur’an, sometimes utilizing water as a medium. Water that has been blessed through prayer is believed to be a source of blessings and healing. Additionally, Sanro practitioners possess herbal concoction skills and employ physical touch, such as applying pressure to the patient’s nerve points. Through these healing practices, Sanro medicine can contest the discourse of modern knowledge while maintaining local culture in the Jalange community of Barru Regency, Indonesia. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article, I shall explore the social dimension of Friedrich Nietzsche's views on self-fashioning, focusing on the interpretation offered by Alexander Nehamas. First, I shall briefly present Nehamas's understanding of Nietzsche's views on self-fashioning and the overall significance of their social aspects. Then I shall investigate the need for the audience to assess one's attempt at self-fashioning. Furthermore, I shall analyze how one's pursuit of self-fashioning is influenced by and influences other similar efforts. Subsequently, the article will reveal the role of contest in the phenomenon of influence. Finally, I shall point out some limitations of Nehamas's interpretation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In many animals, contest winners are more likely to win subsequent matches while contest losers tend to lose their later fights. Such winner and loser effects can have long-lasting impacts on individual behaviour and fitness. Recent observations suggest that winner and loser effects may occur in humans, and we thus critically tested this proposition in two experiments involving video games and reading comprehension. We randomly assigned human participants to either win or lose in phase 1 by manipulating their task difficulty. Then we tested their performance in phase 2, which was moderately difficult for all participants. In both experiments, randomly assigned phase 1 winners performed significantly better in phase 2 than did randomly assigned phase 1 losers. The effect size was higher in the video game experiment than in the reading comprehension test, perhaps because the former involved an overt contest with one winner and one loser. Finally, men and women exhibited similar magnitudes of winner and loser effects. Our experimental approach as well as further critical experiments with humans can help us better understand winner and loser effects in general as well as their possible important influence on human performance. • In many animals, contest winners win subsequent matches more often than do losers. • We critically tested winner and loser effects in humans in two experiments. • Randomly assigned phase 1 winners outperformed phase 1 losers in phase 2. • Men and women exhibited similar magnitudes of winner and loser effects. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The media-based communication between social movements and other actors is relevant to achieve their goals. This article addresses the dynamic and contentious aspects of the mediabased communication generated by the Magallanes Social Movement and the Government of Chile. A quantitative analysis was made of 217 news and 499 quotations published during the events. The results indicate that the parties adopted differing communication strategies like making calls for action, talking positively about the own group, among others. Furthermore, the content of communications varied over time, but the strong relation between the communications issued and the occurrence of particular protest events suggests that while a communicational contest is certainly an interactive process, both camps do not just argue through the words, but also through the events that each camp organizes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We study all-pay auctions with one-sided private information and interdependent valuations. To sharpen the competition and maximize revenue, the auction organizer can design an information disclosure policy through Bayesian persuasion about the bidder with private information. We characterize optimal disclosure and find that optimal disclosure exhibits almost full disclosure, where the uninformed bidder can always narrow the informed bidder's private information down to at most two types. We also illustrate our characterization in a simple binary-type setting and investigate issues such as comparative statics, welfare, and efficiency. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

How to Optimally Design Contests in Development Settings for Rapid and Efficient Results: Firms increasingly leverage their expert suppliers to develop innovative products and services while minimizing both time-to-market and expenses. In "Dynamic Development Contests," Sina Khorasani, Ersin Korpeoglu, and Vish Krishnan study how companies can effectively organize contests to stimulate development efforts from competing suppliers to minimize project lead times while keeping the cost of incentives in check. Their characterization of the optimal designs reveals that flexible rewards are most effective when funds are sufficient. However, in cases where resources are constrained, strategic information disclosure in the form of probabilistic disclosure of any change in the state of competition serves as a valuable incentive instrument that helps contest organizers achieve their lead-time minimization objectives. Public, private, and not-for-profit organizations find advanced technology and product development projects challenging to manage due to the time and budget pressures, and turn to their development partners and suppliers to address their development needs. We study how dynamic development contests with enriched rank-based incentives and carefully tailored information design can help these organizations leverage their suppliers for their development projects while seeking to minimize project lead time by stimulating competition among them. We find that an organization using dynamically adjusted flexible rewards can achieve the minimum expected project lead time at a significantly lower cost than a fixed-reward policy. Importantly, the derived flexible-reward policy pays the minimum expected reward (i.e., achieves the first best). We further examine the case where the organization may not have sufficient budget to offer a reward that attains the minimum expected lead time. In this case, the organization uses the whole reward budget and supplements it with strategic information disclosure. Specifically, we derive an optimal information disclosure policy whereby any change in the state of competition is disclosed immediately with some probability that is weakly increasing over time. Our results indicate that dynamic rewards and strategic information disclosure are powerful tools to help organizations fulfill their development needs swiftly and cost effectively. Funding: V. V. Krishnan is grateful for funding support from the Jacobs Family Foundation. Supplemental Material: The e-companion is available at https://doi.org/10.1287/opre.2021.0420. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article describes the implementation of a professional development program for young librarians from the CIS countries, which was implemented with the support of the MFGS in 2023 by the M.I. Rudomino All-Russian State Library for Foreign Literature (Moscow) and the V. Mayakovsky Central City Library (St. Petersburg). The topics and brief content of professional events as part of the program are listed. Its results and significance for the formation and strengthening of the professional community of libraries in the CIS are presented. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Children with disability face many barriers to participating in community sports. Little Athletics Australia aims to increase fair and meaningful inclusion via a new structure which will enable all children to take part in the same contest by competing for their ‘personal best’ score. Named the True Inclusion Method (TIM), this new structure will be piloted in 13 sites across six states. Formative evaluation of this pilot will critique TIM and its implementation using observations of events, and interviews and surveys with child athletes with and without disability, their parents/carers and Little Athletics volunteers. Implementation outcomes are acceptability, appropriateness, adoption, feasibility and fidelity. Qualitative data will be analysed thematically. TIM is designed to encourage inclusive participation by children with disability in sporting events, and to improve the competitive experience for all children by celebrating personal achievement and fostering fun.

In this article, I shall explore the social dimension of Friedrich Nietzsche's views on self-fashioning, focusing on the interpretation offered by Alexander Nehamas. First, I shall briefly present Nehamas's understanding of Nietzsche's views on self-fashioning and the overall significance of their social aspects. Then I shall investigate the necessity of the audience to assess one's attempt at self-fashioning. Furthermore, I shall explore how one's pursuit of self-fashioning is influenced by and influences other similar efforts. Finally, the article will reveal the role of contest in the phenomenon of influence.

The media-based communication between social movements and other actors is relevant to achieve their goals. This article addresses the dynamic and contentious aspects of the media-based communication generated by the Magallanes Social Movement and the Government of Chile. A quantitative analysis was made of 217 news and 499 quotations published during the events. The results indicate that the parties adopted differing communication strategies like making calls for action, talking positively about the own group, among others. Furthermore, the content of communications varied over time, but the strong relation between the communications issued and the occurrence of particular protest events suggests that while a communicational contest is certainly an interactive process, both camps do not just argue through the words, but also through the events that each camp organizes.

We study a contest problem in which two players compete on a continuum of battlefields by spending resources subject to some constraints on their strategies. Following Myerson (1993) , we assume that each player's resource allocation on each battlefield is an independent random draw from the same distribution. Within each battlefield, the player who allocates a higher level of resources wins, but both players incur costs for resource allocation. To analyze this problem, we introduce a systematic way to identify equilibrium allocation strategies and show that any equilibrium strategy of a player renders the rival indifferent in terms of the "constraint-adjusted payoff". Using this, we provide a complete characterization of equilibrium allocation strategies. We also show that whereas a symmetric budget constraint may induce players to spend more resources than in the case with no constraint, asymmetric budgets that are proportional to players' values of winning would eliminate this possibility. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Problem definition: Firms seek to use the contest format to source solutions from a broader network of outside solvers. We study the application of the contest approach in multistage settings and show how and when screening of contestants between stages can produce improved contest outcomes. Methodology/results: We present an application-driven game-theoretic model to capture imperfections in screening using the true-positive rate (sensitivity) and the true-negative rate (specificity). Specifically, we consider a two-stage contest with a screening decision by the firm between the stages. Solvers face uncertainty about their probability of fit, and the final quality of the solution is dependent on the performance across both stages. We identify two mechanisms through which screening induces greater effort, namely the encouragement effect and the competitive contest effect, and characterize how screening should be tuned to the problem setting. We find that filtering out true negatives in contests with exogenous solvers' probability of fit is optimal for solution-seeking firms. Our results indicate that in case of problems with endogenous probability of fit and less up-front complexity, coarse (imperfect) screening is beneficial in order to manage competition and stimulate greater effort, but it behooves the firm to resort to more accurate screening otherwise. We also derive nuanced results for the case when a seeker faces screening constraints and must balance screening sensitivity and specificity. Managerial implications: Our work provides firms an additional degree of freedom in terms of specific and sensitive screening to design and run contests and to better engage outside solvers. We derive actionable results and translate them into a managerial framework to help fine-tune the screening mechanism for improved contest performance. Supplemental Material: The online appendix is available at https://doi.org/10.1287/msom.2021.0378. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Agonism permeates Nietzsche's spirit and works from early on starting with his close engagement with ancient Greece. However, while many thinkers have made references to agon in Nietzsche in the twentieth century, this aspect of his philosophy did not come under close scrutiny until a few decades ago, and some of the research in this area saw its first monographs in Tuncel's Agon in Nietzsche (2013) and Acampora's Contesting Nietzsche (2013). In addition to these two works and prior to them, an anthology, Nietzsche, Power and Politics, based on the proceedings of a conference and edited by Herman W. Siemens and Vasti Roodt, came out in 2008. The three editions reviewed here bring out many other aspects, insights, and nuances in the study of agon in Nietzsche's works. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We study a two-player contest in which each player is endowed with an initial probability of winning the prize and hires a delegate who expends effort on each player's behalf. We show that (i) the players' equilibrium delegation contracts are monotonic in the initial probabilities of winning and the impact parameter; (ii) the delegates' equilibrium effort levels are monotonic in the impact parameter but not in the initial probabilities of winning; and (iii) a contest designer may attain various objectives of contest design by choosing a proper value of the impact parameter. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A two-stage-two-group contest is studied. In stage 1, each group members decide aggregation method that transforms their efforts into group performance. In stage 2, members in groups exert efforts to win a group-specific public-good prize. Members have different valuations on the prize and thus have different preferences in deciding aggregation rule. We find that the all-out type of aggregation method gets a more group-efficient outcome than the half-hearted type; the group-efficient choice can be reached through a side-payment delegation contract; and both groups choose the all-out aggregation method in equilibrium. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Sexual selection pressures play a significant role in driving the evolution of color, morphological, and behavioral traits that serve as signals to communicate fighting ability between opponents. In lizards, body and head size often predict the outcome of male-male contests, but these morphological signals are static during and after the contest. However, coloration and behaviors may be dynamic traits that change during interactions being a potential mechanism of continuous evaluation of current or future opponents. In this study, we examine the function of color change as a signal in agonistic interactions between males of the Achala copper lizard. Also, we examine the relationship between fighting ability and multiple traits, including body size, head size, behaviors, and coloration. Furthermore, we explore the variability of agonistic encounters between reproductive and non-reproductive periods. We performed dyadic trials between males to evaluate behavior and measure dorsal color before and after the trials. Results show that Pristidactylus achalensis can modify the lightness of their skin during intrasexual interaction, with winners displaying lighter colors than losers. We observed dramatic changes from very light green to totally dark coloration. Notably, color difference between competitors was distinguishable only after the trial, not before. Winners also displayed more push-up behaviors, predicting the outcome of the agonistic interactions. Additionally, we did not find differences in the behavioral repertoire between periods (reproductive vs non-reproductive). We suggest that push-up behavior and color change are essential signals that allow contenders to assess their opponent's fighting ability from a distance without physical interaction and settle conflicts without escalating aggression. Significance statement: Animals may use multiple signals in agonistic interactions to facilite opponent assessment. Although body size and morphological sexual traits usually predict outcome, these traits are static but the dynamic of the coloration through fast color change add an extra factor to interpret the communication. We examine the function of color change as a signal and the relation between fighting ability of an endemic lizard from highlands of central Argentina. We demonstrated that males possess the ability to change their color, and winners show lighter colors than the losers. We suggest color changes together with push-up behavior are essential signals for the resolution of the conflict allowing the contenders to assess the opponent from a distance without physical interaction. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the effects of disclosing the actual number of participants in innovation contests with endogenous stochastic entry. We model innovation contests as a two-bidder all-pay auction with complete information, but in which each bidder has to incur a private cost to participate. The contest organizer observes solvers' participation decisions ex post and can commit ex ante to either fully disclosing or concealing the number of participating solvers. We characterize the equilibrium behavior of the solvers and compare the performances of the disclosure policies by four criteria. We find that full concealment dominates full disclosure in terms of expected total bid and expected winner's bid. Full concealment is dominated by full disclosure in terms of prize allocation efficiency and solvers' welfare. These findings are in sharp contrast to those under exogenous entry. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As informational leakages become a common occurrence in economic and business settings, the impact of observability on behavior in adversarial situations assumes increased importance. Consider a two-player contest where there is a probabilistic information leak about one player's action and the recipient of the information has the ability to revise his contest expenditure in response to the leaked rival choice. How does the ability to revise and resubmit affect each contestant's behavior? We design a laboratory experiment to study this question for two well-known contest games: the lottery contest and the all-pay auction. Equilibrium predicts that compared to simultaneous moves, the strategic asymmetry arising from the ability to revise has no effect on expected expenditure in the lottery contest. In contrast, in the all-pay auction expected expenditure is decreasing in the probability of informational leakage. Experimental data support these predictions despite overexpenditure relative to equilibrium. Furthermore, the potential observability of the rival's action confers an advantage on the informed player not only in the all-pay auction, as theory predicts, but also in the lottery contest if the probability of leakage is high. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The gig economy provides workers with the benefits of autonomy and flexibility but at the expense of work identity and coworker bonds. Among the many reasons why gig workers leave their platforms, one unexplored aspect is the lack of an organization identity. In this study, we develop a team formation and interteam contest field experiment at a ride-sharing platform. We assign drivers to teams either randomly or based on similarity in age, hometown location, or productivity. Having these teams compete for cash prizes, we find that (1) compared with those in the control condition, treated drivers work longer hours and earn 12% higher revenue during the contest; (2) the treatment effect persists two weeks postcontest, albeit with half of the effect size; and (3) drivers in hometown-similar teams are more likely to communicate with each other, whereas those in age-similar teams continue to work longer hours and earn higher revenue during the two weeks after the contest ends. Together, our results show that platform designers can leverage team identity and team contests to increase revenue and worker engagement in a gig economy. This paper was accepted by David Simchi-Levi, behavioral economics and decision analysis. Funding: Financial support from the platform through the Michigan Institute for Data Science is gratefully acknowledged. Supplemental Material: The e-companion are data are available at https://doi.org/10.1287/mnsc.2022.4624. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As we usually do every year, on June 9, 2023, the Robotics Society of Romania, Târgovişte branch, organized the professional student competition "ROBOTS IN ACTION", the 16th edition. Students and master's students of the Faculty of Electrical Engineering, Electronics and Information Technology, within the "Valahia" University in Târgovişte, were involved in this engineering applications competition.

A contest usually involves expenditures, termed "overbidding," exceeding the theoretical Nash equilibrium. A considerable number of studies have shown that group identity can affect decision-making and competitive behavior, thus providing a new perspective on alleviating the overbidding problem. How group identity influences brain activity when competitors bid in different groups is not yet clear, however. In this study, we implemented group identity manipulation into the lottery contest game and we recorded behavioral and electroencephalography (EEG) data at the same time. Two experimental treatments were conducted to study the effect of group identity on bidding behavior. The event-related potentials (ERP) and event-related oscillations (ERO) techniques were utilized to explore brain activity differences caused by participants' different bidding behaviors under in-group and out-group conditions. Behavioral results showed that individual expenditure was significantly lower when bidding with in-group opponents than with out-group opponents. Analyses of EEG results revealed that compared to in-group conditions, greater N2 amplitudes and theta power were found under out-group conditions. To extend previous studies, we performed supplementary analysis to explore whether enhancement of group identity had effects on conflict alleviation. Behavioral results indicated that individual expenditure was significantly lower after enhancing group identity when bidding with in-group, and EEG results showed more negative N2 amplitudes, smaller P3 amplitudes and larger theta power after enhancing group identity. Collectively, these findings indicate that group identity modulated bidding behavior, and they provide insight into a mechanism to de-escalate group conflict by enhancing group identity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We introduce a new approach to studying the existence of a monotone pure-strategy Bayesian-Nash equilibrium in an n -player single-prize contest model that covers both perfectly and imperfectly discriminating contests. The contestants have continua of possible types and bids, atomless type distributions, and their valuations and costs might depend not only on their own bids and types but also on other bidders' bids and types. Many, quite different contests are covered by our generalized contest model and equilibrium existence in monotone pure strategies in them follows from this paper's results. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Rapid advances in science and engineering, and pervasive adoption of resulting technological products, are influencing every aspect of human living and fueling a growing demand for a workforce that is adequately prepared for the emerging occupations in STEM fields. Educating students for success in the modern technology-rich workplace requires teachers who have the knowledge, comfort, capability, and training to adopt and integrate new technologies for classroom teaching and learning. Thus, to prepare high school teachers for incorporating robotics in their students' education and promoting their understanding of engineering concepts and technology applications, a four-week long robotics workshop was designed and conducted annually for three summers. Examination of changes in the workshop participants' levels of robotics self-efficacy, familiarity, and content knowledge, as well as analysis of outcomes of robotics capstone projects and end-of-year contests, is suggestive of study findings being promising for education researchers and professional development providers interested in leveraging the potential of robotics in STEM education. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The transition from academic training to professional life is not an easy task. In recent years, various learning enhancement methodologies have emerged to reduce this gap, which focuses on both soft and technical skills. Specifically, Competition-Based Learning (CBL) seeks to improve learning and motivation through the competitive component, which has detractors and defenders. In this framework, the present work proposes a national competition, CIC2022, within the field of control engineering that uses a testbed with an Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) for helping to link theory and practice. The main objective is to analyze the results of CBL on learning. In addition to explaining the characteristics of the competition and the academic results obtained, a survey answered by participants provides conclusions on the effectiveness of the methodology and other issues related to the contest. Greater motivation and teamwork promoted the active learning of students and improved the autonomous acquisition of technical skills.

Abstract Background Animals use contests to attain resources and employ strategic decisions to minimise contest costs. These decisions are defined by behavioural response to resource value and competitive ability, but remain poorly understood. This is because the two factors are typically studied separately. Also, their study relies on overgeneralised assumptions that (i) strategies are fixed, (ii) modulated by the motivation or drive to fight and (iii) used to manage costs proportional to the timing of the loser’s retreat. To address these problems, we adopt an integrative sequential analysis that incorporates competitive ability and resource value factors, to characterise territorial contest decisions in male Siamese fighting fish (Betta splendens). Results Individuals exhibited a chronological organisation of behaviour, engaging opponents first with frontal display, then switching to lateral display before deciding to attack, and reserved retreats for later stages. Using asymmetries in retreats as a proxy for outcome, the likelihood of winning was found to be mostly dependent on display. However, resource and contest conditions affected initiation latency, display, attack and retreat, suggesting that strategic decisions influence all behaviour. Overall, sequential behaviour varied consistently with individual aggressiveness and resource-value factors, and increasingly with information on competitive ability collected during the contest. This enabled shifts in tactics, such as disadvantaged individuals responding first with aggression and later with submission. Motivation to continue fighting, after interruption by startle, was also adjusted to information gathered during the contest and progressively with energetic state. Two clusters of correlated behaviours were identified, cost-mitigation (display and retreat) and escalation (initiation and attack), but changes in motivation were associated only with cost mitigation. Conclusions Our findings contrast dominant assumptions that strategic decisions are fixed, controlled by motivational state and sufficiently described by outcome-dependent measures. We instead demonstrate that strategic decisions are complex, comprising functional changes in assessment, information use and motivational effects, which are not always inter-dependent.

In this paper, we study the optimal disclosure of bidders' types in a two-bidder all-pay auction in the presence of a common and exogenously given bid cap. We focus on the set of disclosure policies that are contingent on realizations of bidders' types and fully characterize the unique symmetric equilibrium under each of them. We find that, allowing only for full disclosure and full concealment, the ex ante expected revenue is higher under full disclosure only for intermediate levels of the bid cap. Allowing also for partial disclosure policies: (i) the ex ante expected revenue under full disclosure is higher than under partial disclosure to low-type bidders but lower than under partial disclosure to high-type bidders, regardless of the bid cap; (ii) full concealment could rank from the highest to the third highest, depending on the bid cap, the prior type distribution, and the type values. These results are due to the different sensitivities of bidders' bids across bidders' types and disclosure policies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While the story of Thomas Aquinas and Bonaventure of Bagnoregio engaging in a friendly contest, at the behest of Pope Urban IV, to compose the Mass and Office of Corpus Christi is likely a pious fiction, one can still ponder the fascinating hypothetical scenario: had such a contest taken place, who might have won? To consider that question, this paper embarks on a close reading of Bonaventure's hymns in his Office of the Passion, comparing his poetic approaches to those of Aquinas in the hymns for Corpus Christi. After an introductory historical examination into the supposed involvement of both friars in the composition of the Corpus Christi liturgy, this article proceeds in three sections. First, a look into select excerpts from Bonaventure's Office of the Passion will establish his general poetic technique. In the transitional second section, a direct comparison between Bonaventure and Aquinas on the composition of the final doxological verses of their respective hymns will place their different poetic styles into greater relief. Third, a broader reading of Aquinas's Eucharistic hymns will highlight the unique qualities of his versified praises. Finally, in light of the foregoing analyses, a prospective winner of the hypothetical contest will be suggested. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]