IN his classic novel, "Catch-22" (1961), Joseph Heller describes a thoroughly frustrating situation faced by a combat pilot in World War II. This is generalized to a "generic" 2x2 strict ordinal game, in which whatever strategy the column player chooses, the best response of the row player is to...

Fallback bargaining is a bargaining procedure under which bargainers begin by indicating their preference rankings over all alternatives. They then fall back, in lockstep, to less and less preferred alternatives - starting with first choices, then adding second choices, and so on - until an...

Approval voting (AV) is a voting system in which voters can vote for, or approve of, as many candidates as they like in multicandidate elections. In 1987 and 1988, four scientific and engineering societies, collectively comprising several hundred thousand members, used AV for the first time....

Political parties in Northern Ireland recently used a divisor method of apportionment to choose, in sequence, ten cabinet ministries. If the parties have complete information about each others' preferences, we show that it may not be rational for them to act sincerely by choosing their...

This paper presents a theory of the productivity slowdown based on the effects that uncertainty has on the productivity of specialized capital. Uncertainty reduces the efficiency of inflexible capital and generates a slowdown. It also increases the demand for flexible capital which retains its...

Auction theory has emphasized the importance of private information to the profits of bidders. However, the theory has failed to consider the question of whether or not bidders will be able to keep their information private. We show that in a variety of contexts bidders will reveal all their...

If machines are indivisible, a vintage capital model nust give rise to income inequality. If new machines are always better than old ones and if society cannot provide everyone with a new machine all of the time, inequality will result. I explore this mechanism in detail.

Games with incomplete information or randomness in the moves of others typically have many decision-theoretically equivalent formulations of the type space. These different formulations correspond to different ways of encoding tha realizations of randomizations in the type of a player. Solution...