Discrete Rent-Seeking Games with an Application to Evidence Production

Authors

Giuseppe Dari-Mattiacci, Columbia Law School
Lewis A. Kornhauser, New York University School of LawFollow

Document Type

Article

Publication Date

2020

DOI

https://doi.org/10.1086/708123

Abstract

Evidence production at trial, the accumulation of patents in a technological race, and lobbying are contests that often involve strategic choices over a discrete set of options. The literature has primarily focused on games with continuous effort choices. We fill this gap by studying a rent-seeking game with discrete effort choices and, for a significant class of games, derive a transformation rule that allows one to find the equilibrium of the discrete game from the equilibrium of the continuous game, which is much simpler to identify. We also discuss the limits of this approach and how well the continuous game approximates the discrete one.

Disciplines

Evidence | Law

Creative Commons License

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License

Comments

© 2020 by The University of Chicago.

Recommended Citation

Giuseppe Dari-Mattiacci & Lewis A. Kornhauser, Discrete Rent-Seeking Games with an Application to Evidence Production, 28 Sup. Ct. Econ. Rev. 285 (2020).
Available at: https://scholarship.law.columbia.edu/faculty_scholarship/3164