Generalized Contest Success Functions

The key element of models of contest is the Contest Success Function (CSF) which speci-fies the winning probabilities of agents. The existing axiomatizations of CSFs assume that contestants can make only one type of investment. This paper generalizes these axiomati-zations to the case where each agent can have multiple types of investments. This allows us to provide a unified framework to extend and interpret the results of Skaperdas (1996) and Clark and Riis (1998), and rationalize some seemingly ad hoc CSFs used by applied researchers. I