We study the intergenerational accumulation of knowledge in an infinite-horizon model of communication. Each in a sequence of players receives an informative but imperfect signal of the once-and-for-all realization of an unobserved state. The state affects all players' preferences over present...

We consider preference relations over information that are monotone: more information is preferred to less. We prove that, if a preference relation on information about an uncountable set of states of nature is monotone, then it is not representable by a utility function.

This paper solves for the set of equilibrium payoffs in bargaining with interdependent values when the informed party makes all offers, as discounting vanishes. The seller of a good is informed of its quality, which affects both his cost and the buyer's valuation, but the buyer is not. To...

We examine the buyer-seller problem under different levels of commitment. The seller is informed of the quality of the good, which affects both his cost and the buyer’s valuation, but the buyer is not. We characterize the allocations that can be achieved through mechanisms in which, unlike...

We consider the n-player houseswapping game of Shapley-Scarf (1974), with indifferences in preferences allowed. It is well-known that the strict core of such a game may be empty, single-valued, or multivalued. We define a condition on such games called "segmentability", which means that the set...

A large literature uses matching models to analyze markets with two-sided heterogeneity, studying problems such as the matching of students to schools, residents to hospitals, husbands to wives, and workers to firms. The analysis typically assumes that the agents have complete information, and...

The set of possible outcomes of a strongly ordinal bimatrix game is studied by imbedding each pair of possible payoffs as a point on the standard two-dimensional integral lattice. In particular, we count the number of different Pareto optimal sets of each cardinality; we establish asymptotic...

Previous research has established that the predictions made by game theory about strategic behavior in incomplete information games are quite sensitive to the assumptions made about the players' infinite hierarchies of beliefs. We evaluate the severity of this robustness problem by...

We consider abstract exchange mechanisms wherein individuals submit "diversified" offers in m commodities, which are then redistributed to them. Our first result is that if the mechanism satisfies certain natural conditions embodying "fairness" and "convenience" then it admits unique prices, in...

We consider mechanisms that provide traders the opportunity to exchange commodity i for commodity j, for certain ordered pairs ij. Given any connected graph G of opportunities, we show that there is a unique mechanism M_G that satisfies some natural conditions of "fairness" and "convenience."...