Evolutionary stability of altruism and envy in Tullock contests

Abstract

This paper considers Tullock contests with altruistic and envious individuals as players. Altruism (envy) is beheld as another motivation for low (high) dissipation rates in contests. A pure population of altruists has higher payoffs than a purely envious population, but the altruist has a lower payoff if he is confronted with an envious individual. In an evolutionary approach in which the population share of the type with the higher material payoff rises, it can be shown that there is a possibility of either envy or altruism becoming extinct. Furthermore, we find an advantage of envy in such a manner that very altruistic individuals always die out, but very envious ones only do so under certain conditions.