American colleges and universities compete with each other for undergraduate and graduate students, faculty and staff, research funding, and external contributions, as well as on athletic fields. This competition is often alleged to be a zero-sum game; what one institution wins, another must lose. However, as the authors show here, the Common Application, an organization that provides a common admissions application that students can submit to any member institution, yields benefits to all participants. It demonstrates how competitors can collaborate to their mutual advantage--in this case, by increasing the quality and quantity of applicants to all the competing institutions. (Contains 2 figures and 6 resources.)