Summary of my research
"One of the symptoms of an approaching nervous breakdown is the belief that one's work is terribly important." -- Bertrand Russell.
I work primarily in the area of contests. A contest is a game in which players compete over a prize by making irreversible outlays. Contests are an important fact and pervasive aspect of economic life. Election campaigns, rent-seeking games, R & D races, competition for monopolies, litigation, wars, and sports are all examples of contests.
I was introduced to contests by Dan Usher via Tullock’s (1980) seminal game-theoretic piece on rent-seeking in a Public Economics class in December 1994 while I was an MA student at Queen’s University, Canada. Growing up in Ghana, I saw a lot of rent-seeking behavior, which made it easy for me to relate to this phenomenon. Since then my research has primarily focused on contests.
I have applied contest theory to short-listing (elimination contests), immigration quotas, American Idol, revenge, sabotage, third-party intervention in conflicts, burning out, the 2002 winter Olympics scandal in Salt Lake City, rematches in boxing, etc. My 1999 Public Choice paper on "The design of rent-seeking competitions:..." was one of the articles in the late 1990s to examine elimination contests after more than a ten-year research gap since Sherwin Rosen's seminal 1986 American Economic Review article on elimination contests. Kai Konrad of the Free University of Berlin and one of the prolific authors in this field, has recently written a book on contests titled "Strategy and Dynamics in Contests", which will be published by Oxford University Press in February 2009.
In a 2006 paper in Public Choice titled “A contest success function with a tractable noise parameter”, I proposed a contest success function which is easier to use than Tullock’s (1980) logit function, when the players in a contest are non-identical. The proposed function was originally studied in Dasgupta and Nti (1998) in a model with identical contestants. I have applied this function to the study of Immutable Characteristics and Discrimination.Recently, I have turned my attention to economics and psychology. Indeed, my first paper in this area was a chapter in my PhD thesis titled "Misery loves company: social influence and the supply/pricing decision of popular night clubs." I have written papers on "Gratitude, Economics, and Warm Glow". I recently finished a paper titled "Guilt Aversion and Insincerity-Induced Disutility"
J. Atsu Amegashie
November 1, 2007
"One of the symptoms of an approaching nervous breakdown is the belief that one's work is terribly important." -- Bertrand Russell.