Abstract
In many competitive and conflict settings, players seem to have clear incentives to publicly state their strong desire to win an upcoming contest. Despite being widely recognized as crucial parts of players' competitive strategies, these incentives are mostly studied in incomplete information settings. Hence, those studies have offered signaling-based explanations where players claim to be strong. By contrast, focusing on complete information, I offer a complementary explanation by showing that players may prefer making such public statements prior to at contest. This result contrasts with that of Fu et al. (2013), which shows that when players suffer from a credibility loss in the case of a failed public statement, both the favorite and the underdog prefer remaining silent prior to the contest. While we assume that players suffer from a credibility loss by making a successful statement as in Fu et al.'s paper, we assume that they enjoy a credibility gain, contrary to theirs. That is, the presence of an audience can present a "stick," as in Fu et al. (2013), and a "carrot" for pre-contest communications. In particular, it is clear that if only a carrot were provided, then, unlike in Fu et al., players would always make public statements. Thus, whether or not public statements are made in equilibrium should depend on the amount of credibility gained relative to credibility lost as well as the degree of competition.