The assumption that decision makers choose actions to maximize their preferences is a central tenet in economics. This assumption is often justied either formally or informally by appealing to evolutionary arguments. In contrast, we show that in almost every game and for almost every family of...

This paper develops a general methodology for characterizing the dynamic evolution of preferences in a wide class of strategic interactions. We give simple conditions characterizing the limiting distribution of preferences in general games, and apply our results to study the evolutionary...

We examine the strategic behavior of leaders and followers in sequential duopoly experimentsin which followers either perfectly observe the leaders’ actions or else observe nothing. Ourexperiments show that consistent with the theory, leaders enjoy a greater first-mover advantagewhen followers...

We examine the design of nonlinear prices by a multiproduct monopolist who serves customers with multidimensional but correlated types. We show that the monopoly can exploit the correlations between consumers' types to design pricing mechanisms that fully extract the surplus from each consumer....

We consider auction environments in which bidders must incur a cost to learn their valuations and study the optimal selling mechanisms in such environments. These mechanisms specify for each period, as a function of the bids in previous periods, which new potential buyers should be asked to bid....

We study the design of profit maximizing single unit auctions under the assumption that the seller needs to incur costs to contact prospective bidders and inform them about the auction. With independent bidders’ types and possibly interdependent valuations, the seller’s problem can be...

This paper constructs a type space that contains all types with a finite depth of reasoning, as well as all types with an infinite depth of reasoning - in particular those types for whom finite-depth types are conceivable, or think that finite-depth types are conceivable in the mind of other...

In an important paper, Weinstein and Yildiz (2007) show that if players have an infinite depth of reasoning and this is commonly believed, types generically have a unique rationalizable action in games that satisfy a richness condition. We show that this result does not extend to environments...

Consider an exchange economy with asymmetric information. What is the set of outcomes that are consistent with common knowledge of rationality and market clearing? To address this question we define an epistemic model for the economy that provides a complete description not only of the beliefs...