Pub Date : 2025-09-05DOI: 10.1016/j.geb.2025.08.012
Thea How Choon
Do interest groups provide information in ways that systematically bias and polarize candidates? I consider a Downsian model where candidates are uncertain about the median voter's preference. Up to two interest groups, completely biased, observe voter preferences in the extremes and send costless messages to candidates. Starting with one interest group, I show all informative equilibria are asymmetric: the interest group “plays favorites” by revealing coarse information to one candidate, causing policy divergence. Informative equilibria exist only if the interest group has sufficiently broad information. With opposing interest groups, this requirement is relaxed. I describe equilibria where each candidate is more sensitive to voter shocks in one tail, leading to policy convergence in the center and divergence in the tails. The presence of interest groups reframes the policy space, demarcating the consensus “moderate” regions from the “extremes”.
{"title":"Interest group information in elections","authors":"Thea How Choon","doi":"10.1016/j.geb.2025.08.012","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.geb.2025.08.012","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>Do interest groups provide information in ways that systematically bias and polarize candidates? I consider a Downsian model where candidates are uncertain about the median voter's preference. Up to two interest groups, completely biased, observe voter preferences in the extremes and send costless messages to candidates. Starting with one interest group, I show all informative equilibria are asymmetric: the interest group “plays favorites” by revealing coarse information to one candidate, causing policy divergence. Informative equilibria exist only if the interest group has sufficiently broad information. With opposing interest groups, this requirement is relaxed. I describe equilibria where each candidate is more sensitive to voter shocks in one tail, leading to policy convergence in the center and divergence in the tails. The presence of interest groups reframes the policy space, demarcating the consensus “moderate” regions from the “extremes”.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":48291,"journal":{"name":"Games and Economic Behavior","volume":"154 ","pages":"Pages 129-148"},"PeriodicalIF":1.0,"publicationDate":"2025-09-05","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"145049196","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"经济学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2025-09-04DOI: 10.1016/j.geb.2025.08.011
Sebastian Schweighofer-Kodritsch , Steffen Huck , Macartan Humphreys
We introduce political salience into a canonical model of attacks against political regimes, as scaling agents' expressive payoffs from taking sides. Equilibrium balances heterogeneous expressive motives with incentives to avoid sanctions by “bandwagoning” with the winning side. We examine comparative statics in political salience, which we characterize in terms of equilibrium stability as well as attack size. A main insight is that when regime sanctions are weak, increases in salience can pose the greatest threat to seemingly safe regimes: ever smaller shocks become sufficient to drastically escalate into full-blown attacks, i.e., the regime becomes less resilient. Stronger regime safeguards not only directly reduce incentives to attack but can overturn these effects, such that increases in salience boost regime resilience. Our results speak to charged debates about democratic resilience, by identifying how safeguards determine when a rise in citizen interest in political action can lead to a threat to democracy.
{"title":"Political salience, endogenous bandwagoning, and regime resilience","authors":"Sebastian Schweighofer-Kodritsch , Steffen Huck , Macartan Humphreys","doi":"10.1016/j.geb.2025.08.011","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.geb.2025.08.011","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>We introduce political salience into a canonical model of attacks against political regimes, as scaling agents' expressive payoffs from taking sides. Equilibrium balances heterogeneous expressive motives with incentives to avoid sanctions by “bandwagoning” with the winning side. We examine comparative statics in political salience, which we characterize in terms of equilibrium stability as well as attack size. A main insight is that when regime sanctions are weak, increases in salience can pose the greatest threat to seemingly safe regimes: ever smaller shocks become sufficient to drastically escalate into full-blown attacks, i.e., the regime becomes less resilient. Stronger regime safeguards not only directly reduce incentives to attack but can overturn these effects, such that increases in salience boost regime resilience. Our results speak to charged debates about democratic resilience, by identifying how safeguards determine when a rise in citizen interest in political action can lead to a threat to democracy.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":48291,"journal":{"name":"Games and Economic Behavior","volume":"154 ","pages":"Pages 79-96"},"PeriodicalIF":1.0,"publicationDate":"2025-09-04","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"145020701","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"经济学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2025-09-04DOI: 10.1016/j.geb.2025.08.013
Simon Mauras , Paweł Prałat , Adrian Vetta
We study the stable matching problem under the random matching model where the preferences of the doctors and hospitals are sampled uniformly and independently at random. In a balanced market with n doctors and n hospitals, the doctor-proposing deferred-acceptance algorithm gives doctors an expected rank of order for their partners and hospitals an expected rank of order for their partners (Pittel, 1989; Wilson, 1972). This situation is reversed in an unbalanced market with doctors and n hospitals (Ashlagi et al., 2017), a phenomenon known as the short-side advantage. The current proofs (Ashlagi et al., 2017; Cai and Thomas, 2022) of this fact are indirect, counter-intuitively being based upon analyzing the hospital-proposing deferred-acceptance algorithm. In this paper we provide a direct proof of the short-side advantage, explicitly analyzing the doctor-proposing deferred-acceptance algorithm. Our proof sheds light on how and why the phenomenon arises.
研究了随机匹配模型下的稳定匹配问题，其中医生和医院的偏好是均匀独立随机抽样的。在一个有n名医生和n家医院的均衡市场中，医生提出的延迟接受算法为医生的合作伙伴提供了阶log (n)的期望秩，为医院的合作伙伴提供了阶nlog (n)的期望秩（Pittel, 1989; Wilson, 1972）。在拥有n+1名医生和n家医院的不平衡市场中，这种情况正好相反（Ashlagi et al., 2017），这种现象被称为短面优势。目前对这一事实的证明（Ashlagi et al., 2017; Cai and Thomas, 2022）是间接的，与直觉相反，是基于对医院提议延迟接受算法的分析。在本文中，我们提供了短边优势的直接证明，明确地分析了医生建议延迟接受算法。我们的证据揭示了这种现象是如何以及为什么产生的。
{"title":"A direct proof of the short-side advantage in random matching markets","authors":"Simon Mauras , Paweł Prałat , Adrian Vetta","doi":"10.1016/j.geb.2025.08.013","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.geb.2025.08.013","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>We study the stable matching problem under the random matching model where the preferences of the doctors and hospitals are sampled uniformly and independently at random. In a balanced market with <em>n</em> doctors and <em>n</em> hospitals, the doctor-proposing deferred-acceptance algorithm gives doctors an expected rank of order <span><math><mi>log</mi><mo></mo><mi>n</mi></math></span> for their partners and hospitals an expected rank of order <span><math><mfrac><mrow><mi>n</mi></mrow><mrow><mi>log</mi><mo></mo><mi>n</mi></mrow></mfrac></math></span> for their partners (<span><span>Pittel, 1989</span></span>; <span><span>Wilson, 1972</span></span>). This situation is reversed in an unbalanced market with <span><math><mi>n</mi><mo>+</mo><mn>1</mn></math></span> doctors and <em>n</em> hospitals (<span><span>Ashlagi et al., 2017</span></span>), a phenomenon known as the short-side advantage. The current proofs (<span><span>Ashlagi et al., 2017</span></span>; <span><span>Cai and Thomas, 2022</span></span>) of this fact are indirect, counter-intuitively being based upon analyzing the hospital-proposing deferred-acceptance algorithm. In this paper we provide a direct proof of the short-side advantage, explicitly analyzing the doctor-proposing deferred-acceptance algorithm. Our proof sheds light on how and why the phenomenon arises.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":48291,"journal":{"name":"Games and Economic Behavior","volume":"154 ","pages":"Pages 53-61"},"PeriodicalIF":1.0,"publicationDate":"2025-09-04","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"145011139","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"经济学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2025-09-03DOI: 10.1016/j.geb.2025.08.018
Karol Flores-Szwagrzak, Lars Peter Østerdal
A partnership can yield a return—a loss or a profit relative to the partners' investments. How should the partners share the return? We identify the sharing rules satisfying classical properties (symmetry, consistency, and continuity) and avoiding arbitrary bounds on a partner's share. We show that any such rule can be rationalized in the sense that its recommendations are aligned with those maximizing a separable welfare function. Among these rules, we characterize those formalizing different notions of proportionality and, in particular, a convenient subclass specified by a single inequality aversion parameter. We also explore when a rule can be rationalized by a more general welfare function. Our central results extend to a wider class of resource allocation problems.
{"title":"Rationalizing sharing rules","authors":"Karol Flores-Szwagrzak, Lars Peter Østerdal","doi":"10.1016/j.geb.2025.08.018","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.geb.2025.08.018","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>A partnership can yield a return—a loss or a profit relative to the partners' investments. How should the partners share the return? We identify the sharing rules satisfying classical properties (symmetry, consistency, and continuity) and avoiding arbitrary bounds on a partner's share. We show that any such rule can be rationalized in the sense that its recommendations are aligned with those maximizing a separable welfare function. Among these rules, we characterize those formalizing different notions of proportionality and, in particular, a convenient subclass specified by a single inequality aversion parameter. We also explore when a rule can be rationalized by a more general welfare function. Our central results extend to a wider class of resource allocation problems.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":48291,"journal":{"name":"Games and Economic Behavior","volume":"154 ","pages":"Pages 97-118"},"PeriodicalIF":1.0,"publicationDate":"2025-09-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"145020702","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"经济学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2025-09-02DOI: 10.1016/j.geb.2025.08.009
Ron Berman , Yuval Heller
We study interactions with uncertainty about demand sensitivity that is estimated by analytics algorithms. In our solution concept (1) firms choose seemingly optimal strategies based on estimates from possibly biased analytics algorithms, and (2) the levels of biases form best replies to one another. In equilibrium the firms' algorithms overestimate advertising effectiveness, as observed empirically, which causes advertisers to overspend. In price competitions firms also underestimate price elasticities and set prices too high. In games with strategic complements (substitutes), profits induced by such “naive analytics” equilibria Pareto dominate (are dominated by) those induced by the Nash equilibrium.
{"title":"Naive analytics: The strategic advantage of algorithmic heuristics","authors":"Ron Berman , Yuval Heller","doi":"10.1016/j.geb.2025.08.009","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.geb.2025.08.009","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>We study interactions with uncertainty about demand sensitivity that is estimated by analytics algorithms. In our solution concept (1) firms choose seemingly optimal strategies based on estimates from possibly biased analytics algorithms, and (2) the levels of biases form best replies to one another. In equilibrium the firms' algorithms overestimate advertising effectiveness, as observed empirically, which causes advertisers to overspend. In price competitions firms also underestimate price elasticities and set prices too high. In games with strategic complements (substitutes), profits induced by such “naive analytics” equilibria Pareto dominate (are dominated by) those induced by the Nash equilibrium.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":48291,"journal":{"name":"Games and Economic Behavior","volume":"154 ","pages":"Pages 62-78"},"PeriodicalIF":1.0,"publicationDate":"2025-09-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"145020700","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"经济学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2025-08-27DOI: 10.1016/j.geb.2025.08.010
Ramtin Salamat
When consumers differ in both their valuations and their likelihood of being well-matched with the product, the seller can benefit from offering trial plans as persuasion instruments to the extent of full surplus extraction. In the presence of picky consumers, those skeptical about product quality but willing to pay a premium if the product meets their standards, offering a menu of trials allows the seller to screen consumers and extract more surplus. If consumers with a higher valuation for a well matched product are more skeptical and consumers' expected valuation is an increasing and concave function of their probability of being well-matched, the seller can extract the full surplus by offering a menu of trial plans. This rationale for trials differs from others in the literature which are based on risk aversion or high marginal cost.
{"title":"Trial plans as a means of price discrimination","authors":"Ramtin Salamat","doi":"10.1016/j.geb.2025.08.010","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.geb.2025.08.010","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>When consumers differ in both their valuations and their likelihood of being well-matched with the product, the seller can benefit from offering trial plans as persuasion instruments to the extent of full surplus extraction. In the presence of picky consumers, those skeptical about product quality but willing to pay a premium if the product meets their standards, offering a menu of trials allows the seller to screen consumers and extract more surplus. If consumers with a higher valuation for a well matched product are more skeptical and consumers' expected valuation is an increasing and concave function of their probability of being well-matched, the seller can extract the full surplus by offering a menu of trial plans. This rationale for trials differs from others in the literature which are based on risk aversion or high marginal cost.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":48291,"journal":{"name":"Games and Economic Behavior","volume":"153 ","pages":"Pages 679-701"},"PeriodicalIF":1.0,"publicationDate":"2025-08-27","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144912682","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"经济学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2025-08-27DOI: 10.1016/j.geb.2025.08.008
Jian Song , Daniel Houser
We extend the war of attrition by studying three-period dynamic contest games. In our game, players can either fight against their opponents at the last period or can fight at any period. Waiting is costly. We focus on the role of waiting costs and show that the value of waiting costs is a key factor in determining the type of equilibrium in such dynamic contests. Specifically, when players are allowed to fight only at the last period, as waiting costs increase, contests end earlier, battles are less likely to occur, and the weaker player in a pair is more likely to flee. When allowing players to fight at any time, the pure-strategy Bayesian equilibrium does not exist under sufficiently high waiting costs. A lab experiment verifies most key features of our model in scenarios where players are allowed to fight only at the last period. However, unlike theoretical predictions, we find that as waiting costs increase, the duration of contests and the frequency of battles fail to drop as significantly as theory predicted. In the case where players are allowed to fight at any period, we observe a substantial increase in the frequency of battles, accompanied by a dramatic reduction in the duration of contests compared to the format where players are limited to fighting during the last period. We find evidence of suboptimal behavior among players in both contest formats.
{"title":"Costly waiting in dynamic contests: Theory and experiment","authors":"Jian Song , Daniel Houser","doi":"10.1016/j.geb.2025.08.008","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.geb.2025.08.008","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>We extend the <em>war of attrition</em> by studying three-period dynamic contest games. In our game, players can either fight against their opponents at the last period or can fight at any period. Waiting is costly. We focus on the role of waiting costs and show that the value of waiting costs is a key factor in determining the type of equilibrium in such dynamic contests. Specifically, when players are allowed to fight only at the last period, as waiting costs increase, contests end earlier, battles are less likely to occur, and the weaker player in a pair is more likely to flee. When allowing players to fight at any time, the pure-strategy Bayesian equilibrium does not exist under sufficiently high waiting costs. A lab experiment verifies most key features of our model in scenarios where players are allowed to fight only at the last period. However, unlike theoretical predictions, we find that as waiting costs increase, the duration of contests and the frequency of battles fail to drop as significantly as theory predicted. In the case where players are allowed to fight at any period, we observe a substantial increase in the frequency of battles, accompanied by a dramatic reduction in the duration of contests compared to the format where players are limited to fighting during the last period. We find evidence of suboptimal behavior among players in both contest formats.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":48291,"journal":{"name":"Games and Economic Behavior","volume":"153 ","pages":"Pages 645-678"},"PeriodicalIF":1.0,"publicationDate":"2025-08-27","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144912681","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"经济学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2025-08-21DOI: 10.1016/j.geb.2025.08.007
Bettina Klaus , Flip Klijn , Seçkin Özbilen
We study hedonic coalition formation problems with friend-oriented preferences; that is, each agent has preferences over his coalitions based on a partition of the set of agents, except himself, into “friends” and “enemies” such that (E) adding an enemy makes him strictly worse off and (F) adding a friend together with a set of enemies makes him strictly better off. Friend-oriented preferences induce a so-called friendship graph where vertices are agents and directed edges point to friends.
We show that the partition associated with the strongly connected components (SCC) of the friendship graph is in the strict core. We then prove that the SCC mechanism, which assigns the SCC partition to each hedonic coalition formation problem with friend-oriented preferences, satisfies a strong group incentive compatibility property: group strategy-proofness. Our main result is that on any “rich” subdomain of friend-oriented preferences, the SCC mechanism is the only mechanism that satisfies core stability and strategy-proofness.
{"title":"Core stability and strategy-proofness in hedonic coalition formation problems with friend-oriented preferences","authors":"Bettina Klaus , Flip Klijn , Seçkin Özbilen","doi":"10.1016/j.geb.2025.08.007","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.geb.2025.08.007","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>We study hedonic coalition formation problems with friend-oriented preferences; that is, each agent has preferences over his coalitions based on a partition of the set of agents, except himself, into “friends” and “enemies” such that (E) adding an enemy makes him strictly worse off and (F) adding a friend together with a set of enemies makes him strictly better off. Friend-oriented preferences induce a so-called friendship graph where vertices are agents and directed edges point to friends.</div><div>We show that the partition associated with the strongly connected components (SCC) of the friendship graph is in the strict core. We then prove that the SCC mechanism, which assigns the SCC partition to each hedonic coalition formation problem with friend-oriented preferences, satisfies a strong group incentive compatibility property: <em>group strategy-proofness</em>. Our main result is that on any “rich” subdomain of friend-oriented preferences, the SCC mechanism is the only mechanism that satisfies <em>core stability</em> and <em>strategy-proofness</em>.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":48291,"journal":{"name":"Games and Economic Behavior","volume":"154 ","pages":"Pages 16-52"},"PeriodicalIF":1.0,"publicationDate":"2025-08-21","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"145011138","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"经济学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2025-08-19DOI: 10.1016/j.geb.2025.08.003
Konstantinos Protopappas , David Rietzke
We study the optimal design of an innovation contest where a buyer seeks product variety and faces a moral hazard problem. The suppliers are specialized and may differ in their flexibility to adopt approaches outside their areas of expertise. If the specializations are sufficiently different and suppliers are otherwise symmetric, the buyer attains the first-best with a fixed-prize contest (FPC). If one supplier is inherently advantaged or the specializations are sufficiently close, the first-best is unattainable with an FPC. In all cases, an auction is an optimal contest and implements the first-best, provided the buyer can discriminate within the contest; if not, the buyer may prefer an FPC.
{"title":"Incentivizing variety in innovation contests with specialized suppliers","authors":"Konstantinos Protopappas , David Rietzke","doi":"10.1016/j.geb.2025.08.003","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.geb.2025.08.003","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>We study the optimal design of an innovation contest where a buyer seeks product variety and faces a moral hazard problem. The suppliers are specialized and may differ in their flexibility to adopt approaches outside their areas of expertise. If the specializations are sufficiently different and suppliers are otherwise symmetric, the buyer attains the first-best with a fixed-prize contest (FPC). If one supplier is inherently advantaged or the specializations are sufficiently close, the first-best is unattainable with an FPC. In all cases, an auction is an optimal contest and implements the first-best, provided the buyer can discriminate within the contest; if not, the buyer may prefer an FPC.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":48291,"journal":{"name":"Games and Economic Behavior","volume":"153 ","pages":"Pages 586-621"},"PeriodicalIF":1.0,"publicationDate":"2025-08-19","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144893464","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"经济学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2025-08-19DOI: 10.1016/j.geb.2025.07.012
Segismundo S. Izquierdo , Luis R. Izquierdo
We consider sampling best response decision protocols with statistical inference in population games. Under these protocols, a revising agent observes the actions of k randomly sampled players in a population, estimates from the sample a probability distribution for the state of the population (using some inference method), and chooses a best response to the estimated distribution. We formulate deterministic approximation dynamics for these protocols. If the inference method is unbiased, strict Nash equilibria are rest points, but they may not be stable. We present tests for stability of pure equilibria under these dynamics. Focusing on maximum-likelihood estimation, we can define an index that measures the strength of each strict Nash equilibrium. In tacit coordination or weakest-link games, the stability of equilibria under sampling best response dynamics is consistent with experimental evidence, capturing the effect of strategic uncertainty and its sensitivity to the number of players and to the cost/benefit ratio.
{"title":"Statistical inference in games: Stability of pure equilibria","authors":"Segismundo S. Izquierdo , Luis R. Izquierdo","doi":"10.1016/j.geb.2025.07.012","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.geb.2025.07.012","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>We consider sampling best response decision protocols with statistical inference in population games. Under these protocols, a revising agent observes the actions of <em>k</em> randomly sampled players in a population, estimates from the sample a probability distribution for the state of the population (using some inference method), and chooses a best response to the estimated distribution. We formulate deterministic approximation dynamics for these protocols. If the inference method is unbiased, strict Nash equilibria are rest points, but they may not be stable. We present tests for stability of pure equilibria under these dynamics. Focusing on maximum-likelihood estimation, we can define an index that measures the strength of each strict Nash equilibrium. In <em>tacit coordination or weakest-link</em> games, the stability of equilibria under sampling best response dynamics is consistent with experimental evidence, capturing the effect of <em>strategic uncertainty</em> and its sensitivity to the number of players and to the cost/benefit ratio.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":48291,"journal":{"name":"Games and Economic Behavior","volume":"153 ","pages":"Pages 622-644"},"PeriodicalIF":1.0,"publicationDate":"2025-08-19","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144902434","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"经济学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
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