Solving the n-player Tullock contest

Abstract

The n-player Tullock contest with complete information is known to admit explicit solutions in special cases, such as (i) homogeneous valuations, (ii) constant returns, and (iii) two contestants. But can that model be solved more generally? In this paper, we show that key characteristics of the equilibrium, such as individual efforts, winning probabilities, and payoffs cannot, in general, be expressed in terms of the primitives of the model using basic arithmetic operations plus the extraction of roots alone. In this sense, the Tulloc Show more