We consider “social contracts” which alter the payoffs of players in a noncoperative game, generating new Nash Equilibria (NE). In the domain of contracts which — in conjunction with their concomitant NE — are “self-financing”, our focus is on those that are (Pareto) optimal. By way of a key example, we examine optimal levels of crime and punishment in a population equilibrium. JEL Classificati...

This paper presents synthetically some recent developments in the theory of coalition and network formation. For this purpose, some major equilibrium concepts recently introduced to model the formation of coalition structures and networks among players are brie‡y reviewed and discussed. A few economic applications are also illustrated to give a ‡avour of the type of predictions such models are ...

This paper studies the core of combined games, obtained by summing different coalitional games when bargaining over multiple independent issues. It is shown that the set of balanced transferable utility games can be partitioned into equivalence classes of component games to determine whether the core of the combined game coincides with the sum of the cores of its components. © 2009 Elsevier Inc...

The paper analyses a simplified version of a Glosten-Milgrom style specialist security trading model with trade-timing. In a setting where traders are differentially informed, if the best-informed investors have a sufficiently strong or weak impact on prices then the investors with the strongest impact on prices delay their investment strategically, pretending to be the low-impact types. JEL Cl...

We present a simple example where the use of σ-algebras as a model of information leads to a paradoxical conclusion: a decision maker prefers less information to more. We then explain that the problem arises because the use of σ-algebras as the informational content of a signal is inadequate. We provide a characterization of the different models of information in the literature in terms of Blac...

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 present a series of non-cooperative games with monotone best replies whose set of Nash equilibria coincides with the set of stable matchings. Key features of stable matchings are established as familiar properties of games with monotone best replies. Then we present a sense in which our method is necessary for the monotonicity approach. We also establish the connection of our approach with o...

The study shows that subjects who set their minimum acceptable offer equal to zero in an ultimatum game (UG) are the most generous dictators in a dictator game. The finding implies that interpreting indiscriminately the acceptance of low UG offers as payoff maximization can be misleading and suggests that altruism and/or the desire to maximize welfare are to a large extent behind. JEL Classific...

In this paper we first explore the predictive power of the solution notion called conservative stable standard of behaviour (CSSB), introduced by Greenberg (1990) in environments with farsighted players (as modelled in Xue (1998)) as intuitively it is quite nice. Unfortunately, we find that CSSB has a number of undesirable properties. Therefore, we introduce a refinement of this which we call c...

In the context of priority-based allocation objects, we formulate methods to compare assignments in terms their stability. We introduce three basic properties that a reasonable stability comparison should satisfy. show for any satisfying properties, top trading cycles mechanism is minimally unstable among efficient and strategy-proof mechanisms when objects have unit capacities. Our unifying ap...