Linking individual and collective contests through noise level and sharing rules

•We use Nitzan's sharing rule to introduce tractable noise in an individual contest.•The proposed contest satisfies homogeneity of degree zero.•The proposed contest can be effort or noise equivalent with the Tullock contest.

We propose the use of Nitzan's (1991) sharing rule in collective contests as a tractable way of modelling individual contests. This proposal (i) tractably introduces noise in Tullock contests when no closed form solution in pure strategies exists, (ii) satisfies the important property of homogeneity of degree zero, (iii) can be effort or noise equivalent to a standard Tullock contest.