We study the competitive equilibrium of a market for votes where the choice is binary and it is known that a majority of the voters supports one of the two alternatives. Voters can trade votes for a numeraire before making a decision via majority rule. We identify a sufficient condition...

A group of heterogeneous agents may form partnerships in pairs. All single agents as well as all partnerships generate values. If two agents choose to cooperate, they need to specify how to split their joint value among one another. In equilibrium, which may or may not exist, no agents have...

In many economic situations, a player pursues coordination or anti-coordination with her neighbors on a network, but she also has intrinsic preferences among the available options. We here introduce a model which allows to analyze this issue by means of a simple framework in which players...

Biconcavity is a simple condition on inverse demand that corresponds to the ordinary concept of concavity after simultaneous parameterized transformations of price and quantity. The notion is employed here in the framework of the homogeneous-good Cournot model with potentially heterogeneous...

The equilibrium outcome of a strategic interaction may depend on the weight players place on other playersʼ payoffs or, more generally, on some social payoff that depends on everyoneʼs actions. A positive, negative or zero weight represents altruism, spite or complete selfishness,...

In games with strategic substitutes (GSS), convergence of the best-response dynamic starting from the inf (or sup) of the strategy space is equivalent to global stability (convergence of every adaptive dynamic to the same pure strategy Nash equilibrium). Consequently, in GSS, global stability...

In many economic contexts, an elusive variable of interest is the agent's belief about relevant events, e.g. about other agents' behavior. A growing number of surveys and experiments asks participants to state beliefs explicitly but little is known about the causal relation between beliefs and...

In a credence goods game with an expert and a consumer, we study experimentally the impact of two devices that are predicted to induce consumer-friendly behavior if the expert has a propensity to feel guilty when he believes that he violates the consumerʼs payoff expectations: (i) an...

Rule learning posits that decision makers, rather than choosing over actions, choose over behavioral rules with different levels of sophistication. Rules are reinforced over time based on their historically observed payoffs in a given game. Past works on rule learning have shown that when...

Inspired by the social psychology literature, we study the implications of categorical thinking on decision making in the context of a large normal form game. Every agent has a categorization (partition) of her opponents and can only observe the average behavior in each category. A strategy...