We introduce and axiomatize a class of single‐winner contest success functions that embody the possibility of a draw. We then analyze the game of contest that our success functions induce, having different prizes delivered in the occurrence of a win and a draw. We identify conditions for the existence and uniqueness of a symmetric interior Nash equilibrium and show that equilibrium efforts and equilibrium rent dissipation can be larger than in a Tullock contest (with no possibility of a draw) due to increased competition even if the draw‐prize is null. These results suggest that a contest designer may profit from introducing the possibility of a draw. Finally, we show that this approach naturally extends to multiprize contests with multiple draws across different subsets of the set of players. (JEL C72, D72, D74)

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The full-text may be used and/or reproduced, and given to third parties in any format or medium, without prior permission or charge, for personal research or study, educational, or not-for-prot purposes provided that: • a full bibliographic reference is made to the original source • a link is made to the metadata record in DRO • the full-text is not changed in any way The full-text must not be sold in any format or medium without the formal permission of the copyright holders.

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We model conflict as a multi-prize contest which takes place if a minimum number of players (which we interpret as social classes) reject the status-quo prize distribution. In the event of conflict, the status-quo prizes are reshuffled across players depending on their efforts. We first show that, for a broad family of contest models, equilibrium rent dissipation takes the form of a Generalized Gini coefficient of the prize distribution (also tackling the well-known issue of existence of an equilibrium). Secondly, we show that conflict occurs when inequality is low and deprivation (a concept that we define) is high, where these measures are computed with respect to the prize distribution. Thirdly, we find empirical evidence that supports our predictions using an unbalanced panel of 41 high and middle income countries, taking the number of labor strikes per capita as a proxy for the occurrence of conflict and measuring inequality and deprivation with respect to the income distribution.

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