GT Lab Internal Seminar on November,1: Anastasiia Antsygina

Title: Support Networks in Contests
Speaker: Anastasiia Antsygina, HSE
Date & Time: November, 1; 15.00
Where: Kantemirovskaya str 3/1, 5th floor

Anastasiia Antsygina (HSE) will give a talk on Support Networks in Contests.

Time: 15.00
Abstract: We study how three heterogenous agents form a support network in the face of bilateral conflict. With a positive probability, each agent engages in a contest game, which we model as an all-pay auction with complete information, against one of his peers. Before the contest, the agents can create a network to support each other. Forming a link is costly but results in direct (effort cost reduction) and indirect (joy of winning) benefits. We show that a pairwise stable network always exists, and complete network is never in this set. The exact number of links being formed depends on the size of indirect benefits. In particular, a network with two links is pairwise stable if and only if indirect benefits are large enough. Finally, a pairwise stable  network is generally inefficient and can display either underinvest or overinvest in the links.