We examine the consequences of vote buying, assuming this practice were allowed and free of stigma. Two parties compete in a binary election and may purchase votes in a sequential bidding game via up-front binding payments and/or campaign promises (platforms) that are contingent upon the outcome of the election. We analyze the role of the parties’and voters’preferences in determining the winner...

It is known that on some social choice and economic domains, a social choice function is coalition strategy-proof if and only if it is Maskin monotonic (e.g. Muller and Satterthwaite, 1977). This paper studies the foundation of those results. I provide a set of conditions which is sufficient for the equivalence between coalition strategy-proofness and Maskin monotonicity. This generalizes some ...

Our research is a variant of the third party punishment game. In particular, we want to test whether players have heterogeneous preferences; the levels of the sanction and of the transfer are proportional to the unfairness of the Dictator; the change of the role influences the Observer’s reaction to unfair behavior; players’ decision to punish the Dictator and/or to help the Receiver depends on...

In this paper we provide textual evidence on the sophistication of medieval deterrence strategies. Drawing on one of the great opera librettos based on medieval sources, Wagner’s Tannhäuser, we shall illustrate the use of optimal randomization strategies that can be derived by applying notions of dominance or trembling-hand perfection. Particular attention is paid to the employed randomization ...

We examine the voluntary provision of a public project via binary contributions when contributions may be made over multiple periods. In many situations, early contributors are likely to pay a higher cost than those who wait. We show that in such circumstances the provision of the project always involves delay. Since this game involves coordination on complex, dynamic strategies in the face of ...

In this paper we study the optimal file-sharing mechanism in a peer-to-peer network with a mechanism design perspective. This mechanism improves upon existing incentive schemes. In particular, we show that peer-approved scheme is never optimal and service-quality scheme is optimal only under certain circumstances. Moreover, we find that the optimal mechanism can be implemented by a mixture of p...

This paper extends Lee and Sabourian [14] and examines repeated implementation of a social choice function in a general incomplete information environment where agents are in…nitely-lived and their preferences are determined stochastically in each period. Our main result establishes how any e¢ cient social choice function can be repeatedly implemented in Bayesian Nash equilibrium. Neither incen...

The standard state-spaces of asymmetric information preclude non-trivial forms of unawareness (Modica and Rustichini, 1994, Dekel, Lipman and Rustichini, 1998). We introduce a generalized state-space model that allows for non-trivial unawareness among several individuals, and which satisfies strong properties of knowledge as well as all the desiderata on unawareness proposed this far in the lit...

We show the incompatibility between the existence of stationary subgame perfect equilibria in Shaked’s game of cycling offers with exogenous breakdown and the behavior of players consistent with the Allais Paradox. Thus, the strategic support of the equally marginally bold solution presented in Burgos, Grant, and Kajii [2002. Games Econ. Behav. 38, 28–51] does not go beyond the two-person case....

We provide a bound on the size of simultaneous best response cycles for generic finite two-player games. The bound shows that no cycle will move through the entire strategy space as long as either player has more than two strategies. This bound increases quadratically in the size of the strategy spaces. It is the tightest possible in the sense that we can construct a generic game with a cycle t...