Department of Theoretical Economics Research Seminar with Mariya Teteryathikova

Dear colleagues,  

Department of Theoretical Economics invites you to attend the research seminar with Associate Professor Mariya Teteryatnikova,  HSE

Date: October 3, 2023
Time: 1:00 p.m.
Working language: English
Speaker: Mariya Teteryatnikova, Associate Professor of the Department of Theoretical Economics

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The link to MS Teams: Click here to join the meeting

ID: 338 598 102 924

Access code: LfS47F

Title: "Support Networks in Contests", joint with Anastasia Antsygina

Abstract: We study the incentives for formation of support networks among three heterogeneous agents in view of potential future conflict. With a positive probability, each agent engages in a contest game, which we model as an all-pay auction, against one of the other agents. Before the contest, the agents can create links with each other that will provide support in the contest and thus, determine agents’ competitive strengths. Forming a link is costly but results in direct and indirect benefits.  The direct benefits realize when the player enters into a competition himself and receives support from the connections that were formed, while the indirect benefits occur when the player does not compete himself but derives utility from his connection's success in the competition. We show that a pairwise stable network always exists, and the introduction of indirect benefits has a non-trivial effect on the resulting network structure. In particular, a network with two or more 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.