Strategic Tournaments

Abstract

A strategic (round-robin) tournament is a simultaneous n-player game built on top of a symmetric two-player game G. Each player chooses one action in G and is matched to play G against all other players. The winner of the tournament is the player who achieves the highest total G-payoff. The tournament has several interpretations as an evolutionary model, as a model of social interaction, and as a model of competition between firms with procedurally rational consumers. We prove some general properties of the model and explore the intuition that a tournament encourages riskier behavior. (JEL C72, C73)