Contest Success Functions: Theory and Evidence

Contest success functions, which show how probabilities of win- ning depend on resources devoted to a conflict, have been widely used in the literature addressing appropriative activities (economics), international and civil wars (political science), and group con?ict and selection (evolutionary biology). Two well-known forms of contest success functions predict contest outcomes from the difference between the resources of each side and from the ratio of resources. The analytical properties of a given conflict model, such as the existence of equilibrium, can be drastically changed simply by altering the form of the contest success function. Despite this problem, there is no consensus about which form is analytically better or empirically more plausi- ble. In this paper we propose an integrated form of contest success functions, which has the ratio form and the difference form as limiting cases, and study the analytical properties of this function. We also estimate different contest success functions to see which form is more empirically probable, using data from battles fought in seventeenth-century Europe and during World War II. JEL Categories: C70, D72, D74

[1]  Stathis N. Kalyvas,et al.  International System and Technologies of Rebellion: How the End of the Cold War Shaped Internal Conflict , 2010, American Political Science Review.

[2]  D. McFadden.  Conditional logit analysis of qualitative choice behavior , 1972 .

[3]  Herschel I. Grossman.  Production, Appropriation, and Land Reform , 1994 .

[4]  K. Arrow,et al.  Capital-labor substitution and economic efficiency , 1961 .

[5]  S. Skaperdas.  Contest success functions , 1996 .

[6]  G. Tullock.  THE WELFARE COSTS OF TARIFFS, MONOPOLIES, AND THEFT , 1967 .

[7]  S. Kalyvas.  International System and Technologies of Rebellion : How the Cold War Shaped Internal Conflict , 2009 .

[8]  Kai A. Konrad,et al.  Strategy in contests: an introduction [Strategie in Turnieren – eine Einführung] , 2007 .

[9]  Samuel Bowles,et al.  Being human: Conflict: Altruism's midwife , 2008, Nature.

[10]  Samuel Bowles,et al.  Supporting Online Material Materials and Methods Som Text Figs. S1 and S2 Table S1 References and Notes the Coevolution of Parochial Altruism and War , 2022 .

[11]  Nicholas Sambanis,et al.  What Is Civil War? , 2004 .

[12]  P. Zarembka.  Frontiers in econometrics , 1973 .

[13]  Jack Hirshleifer,et al.  The Technology of Conflict as an Economic Activity , 1991 .

[14]  Hao Jia,et al.  A stochastic derivation of the ratio form of contest success functions , 2008 .

[15]  J. Hirshleifer.  Conflict and rent-seeking success functions: Ratio vs. difference models of relative success , 1989 .

[16]  P. Collier,et al.  Greed and Grievance in Civil War , 1999 .

[17]  Trevor Nevitt Dupuy,et al.  The encyclopedia of military history from 3500 B.C. to the present , 1970 .

[18]  C. War,et al.  Civil War , 2002 .

[19]  J. Fearon.  Rationalist explanations for war , 1995, International Organization.

[20]  R. Stott,et al.  The World Bank , 2008, Annals of tropical medicine and parasitology.

[21]  S. Skaperdas,et al.  Economics of Conflict: An Overview , 2006 .

[22]  Kai A. Konrad,et al.  Strategy in Contests - An Introduction , 2007 .