Statistics of outcomes of competitions

[Eric Bartels]

Hello,

I am looking for pointers to publications in the biology/statistics
community where the following problem arose.   

        An experiment is conducted in which n individuals participate. Some
        individuals can compete with other individuals for a resource. For
        each individual the list of the possible opponents is fixed at the
        beginning. During the observation time some of these competitions take
        place and for each one the winner is noted. Some competitions may end
        in a tie in which case the competition is being treated as if it has
        not taken place.
        At the end we obtain for each individual the number of wins it has
        achieved during the observation time.

This outcome data is to be tested statistically in order to test
certain hypotheses about the population and certain subsets of it. 


I am curious to learn whether this or related problems have been dealt
with in the statistics / biology literature. Any paper where a similar
problem was analysed or pointers to the statistical method of choice
would be very much appreciated.


thanks,

Eric Bartels