In this paper we view bargaining and cooperation as an interaction superimposed on a game in strategic form. A multistage bargaining procedure for N players, the “proposer commitment” procedure, is presented. It is inspired by Nash’s two-player variable-threat model; a key feature is the commitment to “threats.” We establish links to classical cooperative game theory solutions, such as the Shap...

In this paper we present an application of the auction mechanisms to the allocation of a chore (a bad) to one of the bidders belonging to a given set B. We also discuss an extension of such an application to the allocation of a set of chores among an initial set of bidders B. The paper aims at showing how the classic auction mechanism can be modified and adapted for the allocation of bads (chor...

We investigate the welfare effects of policies that increase voter turnout in costly voting models. In a generalized costly voting model, we show that if the electorate is sufficiently large, then increasing voter turnout is generically efficient. Increasing turnout in small elections is only inefficient if the electorate is evenly divided or if there is already almost complete voter participat...

Total Allowable Catch (TAC)-regulating schemes have been introduced in most fisheries. TAC distribution following the Proportional Rule, based on historical catches, implies that harvesters or vessel groups that have captured more in the past and contributed to overfishing are getting larger quotas than groups that have contributed less to overfishing. In contrast to this rule, a more egalitari...

We study top trading cycles in a two-sided matching environment (Abdulkadiroglu and Sonmez (2003)) under the assumption that individuals’ preferences and objects’ priorities are drawn iid uniformly. The distributions of agents’ preferences and objects’ priorities remaining after a given round of TTC depend nontrivially on the exact history of the algorithm up to that round (and so need not be u...

We offer a definition of iterated elimination of strictly dominated strategies (IESDS∗) for games with (in)finite players, (non)compact strategy sets, and (dis)continuous payoff functions. IESDS∗ is always a well-defined order independent procedure that can be used to solve Nash equilibrium in dominance-solvable games. We characterize IESDS∗ by means of a “stability” criterion, and offer a suff...

The literature on the electronic mail game shows that players’ mutual expectations may lock them into requiring an inefficiently large number of confirmations and confirmations of confirmations from one another. This paper shows that this result hinges on the assumption that, with the exception of the first message, each player can only send a message when receiving an immediately preceding mes...

We examine contemporaneous perfect ε-equilibria, in which a player’s actions after every history, evaluated at the point of deviation from the equilibrium, must be within ε of a best response. This concept implies, but is stronger than, Radner’s ex ante perfect ε-equilibrium. A strategy profile is a contemporaneous perfect ε-equilibrium of a game if it is a subgame perfect equilibrium in a pert...

This paper studies the institutional design of the coordination of macroeconomic stabilization policies within a monetary union in the framework of linear quadratic differential games. A central role in the analysis plays the partitioned game approach of the endogenous coalition formation literature. The specific policy recommendations in the EMU context depend on the particular characteristics...

We examine how the probability of persuading an audience depends on resources expended by contending parties. We use a Bayesian approach whereby the audience makes inferences solely based on the evidence produced by the constants. We …nd conditions that yield the well-known additive contest success functions, including the logit function. We also …nd conditions that produce a generalized "di¤er...