Nash proposed an interpretation of mixed strategies as the average pure-strategy play of a population of players randomly matched to play a normal-form game. If populations are finite, some equilibria of the underlying game have no such corresponding 'mass-action' equilibrium. We show that for...

We consider rules (strategies, commitments, contracts, or computer programs) that make behavior contingent on an opponent's rule. The set of perfectly observable rules is not well defined. Previous contributions avoid this problem by restricting the rules deemed admissible. We instead limit the...

We consider contestants who must choose exactly one contest, out of several, to participate in. We show that when the contest technology is of a certain type, or when the number of contestants is large, a self-allocation equilibrium, i.e., one where no contestant would wish to change his choice...

During the past two centuries, western nations have successively extended the voting franchise to citizens of lower income. We explain this process of democratization as a rational way for incumbent elites to wage war effectively on other nations, as in a strategic game of international conflict...

In Spence’s (1973) signaling by education model and in many of its extensions, firms can only infer workers’ productivities from their education choices. In reality, firms also use sophisticated pre–employment auditing to learn workers’ productivities. We characterize the trade–offs...