This paper models a war of attrition where participants first choose contest investment levels that act as a constraint for how long they can compete. To include a measure of the resource’s transferability to other uses (e.g. other contests), expenditures are a convex combination of investment decisions and their ‘bid’ in the contest. It is shown in the symmetric equilibrium that participants u...

We study the war of attrition and the all-pay auction when players' signals are affiliated and symmetrically distributed. We (a) find sufficient conditions for the existence of symmetric monotonic equilibrium bidding strategies and (b) examine the performance of these auction forms in terms of the expected revenue accruing to the seller. Under our conditions the war of attrition raises greater ...

This paper considers a “war of attrition” game in which agents learn about an uncertain state of the world through private signals and from their peers. I provide existence and uniqueness results for a class of equilibria that satisfy a “full-participation” condition, and show that asymmetries in the distribution of information can lead to excessive stopping and an oversupply of information rel...

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It is often observed that public support for non-existential wars diminishes over time, but the micro foundations of this observation as well as its implications for states’ war-fighting capabilities are unclear. I present a modified war of attrition model in which an exogenous event can end the war and the rate of that event is unknown to players. Players’ expectation for the remaining duratio...

We investigate whether selective intermarriage and endogenous ethnic identification interact to hide some of the intergenerational progress achieved by the Mexican-origin population in the United States. In part, we do this by comparing an "objective" indicator of Mexican descent (based on the countries of birth of the respondent and his parents and grandparents) with the standard "subjective" ...

Attrition is the Achilles heel of longitudinal surveys. Drawing on our experience in the Indonesia Family Life Survey, we describe survey design and field strategies that contributed to minimizing attrition over four waves of the survey. The data are used to illustrate the selectivity of respondents who attrit from the survey and, also the selectivity of respondents who move from the place they...