Endogenous strength in conflicts

In this paper we study a two period contest where the strength of players in the second period depends on the result of the contest in the first stage. We show that in contrast to one-shot contests in the same setting, heterogeneous players exert different efforts in the first stage and rent dissipation in the first period may be large. We study the conditions under which the discouragement effect holds. In addition, new issues emerge like the evolution of the strengths and the shares of the prize during the game. © 2012 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.