The economic analysis of conflicts in the light of the "Contest Theory".

Summary This thesis deals with the economic analysis of conflicts, and more particularly with the contribution of a method called "Contest Theory". Starting from the simple postulate that economic agents perform a butter-canon trade-off, conflicts could be integrated into the field of economic analysis. In the first chapter, we provide a synthesis of the main results and describe the decisive role of Contest Success Functions in this theoretical framework. The second chapter shows that, in order to deal with armed conflicts, the institutional identity of agents should be taken into account more in the models of Contest Theory. The third chapter focuses on the motivations that can explain the arms trade between enemies. We show that if the seller has more effective military and non-military technology than the buyer, the arms trade can be mutually beneficial. In the fourth chapter we propose to estimate and compare the four largest forms of Contest Success Functions using data from the virtual world. From a sample of 1957 battles, we find that the ratio form has the highest predictive quality. In other words, the main factor explaining victory on a (virtual) battlefield is the ratio of the number of guns deployed.