Games and Economic Behavior最新文献

We study how voting rules shape voter coordination in large three-candidate elections. We consider three rules, that differ on the number of candidates that voters can support: Plurality (one), Anti-Plurality (two) and Approval Voting (one or two). We show that the Condorcet winner is always elected at some equilibrium under Approval Voting, and that this rule provides better welfare guarantees than Plurality. We then numerically study a dynamic process of political tâtonnement which delivers rich insights. The Condorcet winner is virtually always elected under Approval Voting, but not under the other rules. The dominance of Approval Voting is robust to several alternative welfare criteria and the introduction of expressive voters.

We investigate a widely used mechanism to resolve disputes among business partners, known as Texas Shoot-Out, under Knightian uncertainty. For a non-degenerate range of intermediate valuations, an ambiguity-averse divider truthfully reveals their valuation in equilibrium. As a consequence, the resulting outcome is efficient, in contrast to the Bayesian case. With equal shares, both agents prefer ex-ante to be the chooser and would like to avoid triggering the mechanism in the first place.

In multi-battle team contests with pairwise battles, how battles are organized—sequentially or (partially) simultaneously—may affect the expected winner's total effort (WE), a natural objective in R&D races, elections, and sports. We focus on noise (modeled via the contest success function's discriminatory power) and across-team heterogeneity, abstracting from player-specific heterogeneity. With sufficient noise, we show that: (1) If teams are symmetric, all temporal structures yield the same WE; and (2) If teams are asymmetric, WE is maximized by a fully simultaneous contest and minimized by a fully sequential one. With no noise, we show that: (3) If teams are symmetric, WE is maximized by a fully sequential contest and minimized by a fully simultaneous one; and (4) If teams are asymmetric, neither the fully sequential nor the fully simultaneous temporal structures maximize or minimize WE. Our results use a novel technique that simplifies temporal structure comparisons: extractions and mergers.

In 1971, Wilson (1971) proved that “almost all” finite games have an odd number of mixed Nash equilibria. Since then, several other proofs have been given, but always for mixed extensions of finite games. In this paper, we present a new oddness theorem for large classes of polynomial payoff functions and semi-algebraic sets of strategies. Additionally, we provide some applications to recent models of games on networks such that Patacchini-Zenou's model about juvenile delinquency and conformism (Patacchini and Zenou, 2012), Calvó-Armengol-Patacchini-Zenou's model about social networks in education (Calvó-Armengol et al., 2009), Konig-Liu-Zenou's model about R&D networks (König et al., 2019), Helsley-Zenou's model about social networks and interactions in cities (Helsley and Zenou, 2014).

I study the impact identity change (assimilation) has on economic mobility. I experimentally assign people to different group identities, majority or minority, before they interact in a social coordination setting. In equilibrium, minority assimilators achieve economic mobility by integrating with the majority. In the experiment, assimilators are discriminated against and cannot integrate, if majority members encounter conformists (non-assimilators) in the minority. Thus, assimilators fail to attain economic mobility because those who maintain the status quo impose negative externalities on those who risk changing it.

We consider an auction design problem with private values, where the seller and bidders may enjoy heterogeneous priors about their (possibly correlated) valuations. Each bidder forms an (interim) belief about the others based on his own prior updated by observing his own value. If the seller faces uncertainty about the bidders' priors, even if he knows that the bidders' priors are within any given distance from his, he may find it worst-case optimal to propose a dominant-strategy auction mechanism.

Condorcet domains are sets of preference orders such that the majority relation corresponding to any profile of preferences from the domain is acyclic. The best known examples in economics are the single-peaked, the single-crossing, and the group separable domains. We survey the latest developments in the area since Monjardet's magisterial overview (2009), provide some new results and offer two conjectures concerning unsolved problems. The main goal of the presentation is to illuminate the rich internal structure of the class of maximal Condorcet domains. In an appendix, we present the complete classification of all maximal Condorcet domains on four alternatives obtained by Dittrich (2018).

We examine behavior in a two-stage group contest where intra-group contests are followed by an inter-group contest. Rewards accrue to the winning group, with winners of the intra-group contest within that group receiving a greater reward. The model generates a discouragement effect, where losers from the first stage exert less effort in the second stage than winners. In contrast to the related literature, we show that a prior win may be disadvantageous, generating lower profits for first stage winners as compared to losers. We consider exogenous asymmetry between groups arising from a biased group contest success function. Although the asymmetry occurs in the second stage, its effect plays out in the first stage, with higher intra-group conflict in the advantaged group. Experimental results support the qualitative predictions of the model. However, losers from the first stage bear a higher burden of the group contribution than the theoretical prediction.

The standard extensive-form partitional representation of information in sequential games fails to distinguish the description of the rules of interaction from the description of players' personal traits. Indeed, this representation does not model how the information given to players as per the rules of the game blends with players' cognitive abilities. We propose a representation of sequential games that explicitly describes the flow of information accruing to players rather than the stock of information retained by players encoded in information partitions. Then, we add a game-independent description of players' mnemonic abilities. If players have perfect memory, our flow representation gives rise to information partitions satisfying the perfect recall property, but different combinations of information flows and players' mnemonic abilities may induce the same information partitions. We show how to use our framework to explicitly model a wide array of cognitive limitations and embed them in the representation of game situations.

Observed individual behavior in the presence of ambiguity shows insufficient responsiveness to changes in subjective likelihoods. Despite being integral to theoretical models and relevant in many domains, evidence on the causes and determining factors of such likelihood insensitive behavior is scarce. This paper investigates the role of beliefs in the form of ambiguity perception – the extent to which a decision-maker has difficulties assigning a single probability to each possible event – as a potential determinant. Using an experiment, I elicit measures of ambiguity perception and likelihood insensitivity and exogenously vary the level of perceived ambiguity. The results provide strong support for a perception-based explanation of likelihood insensitivity. The two measures are highly correlated at the individual level, and exogenously increasing ambiguity perception increases insensitivity, suggesting a causal relationship. In contrast, ambiguity perception is unrelated to ambiguity aversion – the extent to which a decision-maker dislikes the presence of ambiguity.