However, in order to accurately assess state-level caption-contest success, our metric should be the number of successes for some set number of attempts, rather than the absolute number of successes.
When the contest is optimally designed, we establish a structural equivalence between this family of noisy-ranking contests and contests built upon Tullock contest success functions.
Using both size-matched contests and a tournament design, we found that both winning and losing experience affected future contest success; males with prior winning experience were more likely to win subsequent contests.
The following general Tullock contest success function satisfies these conditions (Hirshleifer 1989; Skaperdas 1996): begin{array}rcl@ z a,b|g=text{AR})=frac{a^{m}}{a^{m}+b^{m}} end{array} (14).
Despite the challenger's chance of success being determined by a proportional contest success function, the defenders effectively find themselves in an all-pay auction that largely dissipates the value of the defended resources because the challenger will target the weaker defender.
As a result, we have a much higher contest success ratio.
We tested whether genetic background or male traits predicted contest success and aggressive behaviour.
Thus, we tested whether males of the two lineages differed in their aggressive behaviour or competitive ability and whether genetic background, phenotypic traits or parasite load were predictors of contest success and aggressive behaviour in L. schreiberi.
We measured several morphological traits, chosen for their importance in determining contest success in other lizards [31], [32]: body size (snout-vent length, SVL, to the nearest 0.1 mm), head depth (deepest point of head, in line with tympanum), jaw length (angle of the jaw to the tip of the snout) and body mass.
Mr. Simmons said the contest's success would be measured by how many artists submit their work and how many people visit the contest's Web site.
