Showing papers in "Games and Economic Behavior in 2012"

TL;DR: It is shown that, as long as individuals take their personal signals into account in a Bayesian way, repeated interactions lead them to successfully aggregate information and learn the true parameter.

TL;DR: The goal is to use these behavioral models as a prescriptive control approach in distributed multi-agent systems where the guaranteed limiting behavior would represent a desirable operating condition.

TL;DR: Evidence indicates that social frames enter peopleʼs beliefs rather than their preferences, which is inconsistent with the hypothesis that the Community label triggers a desire to cooperate, but consistent with the hypotheses thatSocial frames are coordination devices.

TL;DR: In this article, the authors report an experiment in which two groups compete in a weakest-link contest by expending costly efforts, and they show that intra-group communication leads to more aggressive competition and greater coordination than control treatments without any communication.

TL;DR: It is demonstrated that there are market situations in which affirmative action policies inevitably hurt every minority student – the purported beneficiaries – under any stable matching mechanism.

TL;DR: Findings suggest that people do not treat strategic situations in isolation, but may instead develop heuristics that they apply across games.

TL;DR: This work proposes a variant of log linear learning that is completely uncoupled and that selects an efficient (welfare-maximizing) pure Nash equilibrium in all generic n-person games that possess at least onepure Nash equilibrium.

TL;DR: It is proved that the “clinching auction” is the unique auction that satisfies all these properties when there are two players, the cornerstone of the impossibility result.

TL;DR: A model of diffusion where the individualsʼ behavior is the result of a strategic choice is considered and it is shown that connectivity plays an ambiguous role: while it allows the diffusion to spread, when the network is highly connected, the diffusion is also limited by high-degree nodes which are very stable.

TL;DR: In this paper, the effects of reputation and competition in a trust game were studied and it was shown that if trustees are anonymous, outcomes are poor: trustees are not trustworthy, and trustors do not trust.

TL;DR: It is shown that the efficient network structure critically depends on the marginal cost of R&D collaborations, and the existence of both symmetric and asymmetric equilibria in the network structures.

TL;DR: In this paper, the authors investigate the problem of Nash implementation in the presence of "partially honest" players, where a player is one who has a strict preference for revealing the true state over lying when truthtelling does not lead to a worse outcome than that which obtains when lying.

TL;DR: A payoff equivalence theorem is developed for mechanisms with ambiguity averse participants with preferences of the Maxmin Expected Utility (MEU) form and it is shown that heightened ambiguity lowers ex ante budget deficits.

TL;DR: In this paper, the authors show that regular ADM potential games have an odd number of locally unique pure strategy Nash equilibria, and demonstrate this finding for affective decision making in insurance markets.

TL;DR: It is shown that even small buyer groups composed of buyers with heterogeneous preferences can increase price competition among rival sellers by committing to purchase exclusively from one seller.

TL;DR: A contest with identity-dependent rules in which contestants are privately informed and ex ante heterogeneous is examined, finding that when contestants are sufficiently heterogeneous the weak contestant should be given both a head start and a handicap.

TL;DR: The authors used a laboratory setting to manipulate the subjects' beliefs about the cognitive levels of the players they were playing against in a 2/3 guessing game, and found that individual choices crucially depend on their belief about the level of others.

TL;DR: This work introduces a new solution concept, iterated regret minimization, which exhibits the same qualitative behavior as that observed in experiments in many games of interest, including Traveler's Dilemma, the Centipede Game, Nash bargaining, and Bertrand competition.

TL;DR: In this paper, two rationality arguments are used to justify the link between conditional and unconditional preferences in decision theory: dynamic consistency and consequentialism, and they test the descriptive validity of these rationality arguments with a dynamic version of Ellsberg's three color experiment and find that subjects act more often in line with consequentialism than with dynamic consistency.

TL;DR: In this article, the optimal auction design in a private value setting with endogenous information gathering was studied and it was shown that the optimal monopoly price is always lower than the standard monopoly price.

TL;DR: It is shown in a one-shot setting that the allegedly robust false consensus effect disappears if representative information is readily available, but the effect reappears if a small cognitive effort is required to retrieve the information.

TL;DR: A novel behavioral measure of (dis)trust is introduced, based on individuals willingness to pay to avoid being vulnerable to the target of trust, which finds that subjects discriminate based on perceived characteristics of different targets in determining whether to trust, in a manner consistent with trust elicited using attitudinal measures and with actual trustworthiness.

TL;DR: It is found that digit ratios predict giving in all games, and it is concluded that biological factors play an important role in shaping social preferences.

TL;DR: Ex-ante Pareto dominance is suggested as a relevant criterion by which to compare school choice mechanisms and may be of particular interest to school districts, as they can be thought of as social planners whose goal is to maximize the overall ex-ante welfare of the students.

TL;DR: This paper presents a complete picture of equilibrium selection for asymmetric binary choice coordination games in the small noise limit by transforming the stochastic stability analysis into an optimal control problem, which can be solved analytically.

TL;DR: This work studies the ex-ante efficient allocation of a set of quality-heterogeneous objects to a number of heterogeneous risk-neutral agents, which combines both pooling and screening of values.

TL;DR: It is reported that grim trigger does not describe well individual play and there is wide heterogeneity in strategies; systematic defection does not crowd-out systematic cooperation; and coordination on cooperative strategies does not improve with experience.

TL;DR: The existence of MPEs are established and it is shown that MPE payoffs are not necessarily unique, and a method for constructing pure strategy MPEs for high discount factors is developed.

TL;DR: It is shown that pooling firms with higher assets may reduce the cost of procurement even when default is costless for the sponsor and stronger price competition (auctions) may not only increase the probability of default but also expected rents.

TL;DR: In this paper, the authors introduce a framework of electoral competition in which voters have general preferences over candidates, including immutable characteristics (such as gender, race or previously committed policy positions) as well as their policy positions, which are flexible.