Division of the Humanities and Social Sciences California Institute of Technology Pasadena, California 91125 Equilibria in Campaign Spending Games: Theory and Data

Nber Working Paper Series Experimenting with Measurement Error: Techniques with Applications to the Caltech Cohort Study

Measurement error is ubiquitous in experimental work. It leads to imperfect statistical controls, attenuated estimated effects of elicited behaviors, and biased correlations between characteristics. We develop simple statistical techniques for dealing with experimental measurement error. These techniques are applied to data from the Caltech Cohort Study, which conducts repeated incentivized sur...

Division of the Humanities and Social Sciences California Institute of Technology Pasadena, California 91125 a Contraction Principle for Finite Global Games

I provide a new proof of uniqueness of equilibrium in a wide class of global games. I show that the joint best-response in these games is a contraction. The uniqueness result then follows as a corollary of the contraction property. Furthermore, the contraction mapping approach provides a revealing intuition for why uniqueness arises: Complementarities in games generate multiplicity of equilibri...

Division of the Humanities and Social Sciences California Institute of Technology Pasadena, California 91125 on Incentives and Updating in Agent Based Models

Division of the Humanities and Social Sciences California Institute of Technology Pasadena, California 91125 Existence of Equilibrium in Single and Double Private Value Auctions

We show existence of equilibria in distributional strategies for a wide class of private value auctions, including the rst general existence result for double auctions. The set of equilibria is invariant to the tie-breaking rule. The model incorporates multiple unit demands, all standard pricing rules, reserve prices, entry costs, and stochastic demand and supply. Valuations can be correlated a...

Division of the Humanities and Social Sciences California Institute of Technology Pasadena, California 91125 Learning Dynamics in Mechanism Design: an Experimental Comparison of Public Goods Mechanisms

In a repeated-interaction public goods economy, dynamic behavior may affect the efficiency of various mechanisms thought to be efficient in one-shot games. Inspired by results obtained in previous experiments, the current paper proposes a simple best response model in which players’ beliefs are functions of previous strategy profiles. The predictions of the model are found to be highly consiste...