The set of pure-strategy equilibria in max–min two-group contests with a private good prize

We characterize the set of pure-strategy equilibria in a deterministic group contest with the weakest-link impact function and a private good prize, complementing the results obtained by Lee (2012) and Chowdhury et al. (2016). We consider a two-stage two-group model, where in the first stage the agents simultaneously choose the sharing rule, while in the second stage they choose efforts. We find that there are continua of subgame perfect equilibria, which means that in equilibrium players’ behavior is indeterminate. By additional restrictions on the effort levels of each class of effort equilibria, we are able to computationally characterize the set of subgame perfect Nash equilibria in pure strategies.