Coordinating Thoughts on Coordination Failures

On Coordinating Coordination Failures

This paper examines whether a principal with limited knowledge of agents’ actions can use an income tax scheme to uniquely implement the Pareto optimal equilibrium in a coordination game (i.e. a game with multiple Pareto-ranked equilibria). We show that, in contrast to games with externalities but a unique equilibrium, implementation in coordination games fails generically unless the identity o...

Thoughts on Pharmaceutical Research Coordination

Futurologists continue to tell us (Naisbit 1982, Diebold 1984, Porter 1985, Skinner 1985, Toffler 1990) that we are entering an information age, in which intellectual property and the ability to translate it into flexible productive systems will be the principal competitive advantage available to corporations. Exploiting information systems for this purpose in the pharmaceutical industry is a d...

Coordination Failures

Equilibria with Coordination Failures

This paper extends the literature on equilibria with coordination failures to arbitrary convex sets of admissible prices. This makes it possible to address coordination failures for cases with price indexation or more general price linkages between commodities. We introduce a new equilibrium concept, called quantity constrained equilibrium (QCE), giving a unified treatment to all cases consider...

Decentralized Coordination with Crash Failures

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I thank my adviser, Professor Gul Agha, and the members of the Open Systems Laboratory for supporting my work with their time, resources and ideas. The study described in this thesis is a continuation of a project done in collaboration with Together we built all the infrastructure used in developing this thesis, I have made only relatively small improvements. Since the original ...