In ecology, contest competition refers to a situation where available resources, such as food and mates, are utilized only by one or a few individuals, thus preventing development or reproduction of other individuals. It refers to a hypothetical situation in which several individuals stage a contest for which one eventually emerges victorious. Contest competition has been demonstrated in controlled laboratory experiments among parasitic wasps. Contest competition is the opposite of scramble competition, a situation in which available resources are shared equally among individuals.
As contest competition allows the monopolization of resources, offspring will typically always be produced and survive until adulthood independent of the population size. This results in stable population dynamics, in stark contrast to scramble competition which can result in periodic or chaotic population dynamics. The Beverton-Holt model is often used to represent population dynamics arising from contest competition. This model, and a few other well-known population models, can be explicitly derived from individual-level processes assuming contest competition and a random distribution of individuals among resources.