Teaming up With a Delegate in a Rent‐Seeking Contest

We consider a rent‐seeking contest where two players compete for a single prize. Each player can exert effort in two complementary activities to influence his probability of winning. Each player also has the option to hire a delegate to exert effort in one of these activities on his behalf. We show that if the probability of winning the contest is sensitive enough to the efforts, in equilibrium one of the players teams up with a delegate, whereas the other player does not do so. Hence, delegation by one player arises endogenously in this case.