We characterize the outcomes of games when players may make binding offers of strategy contingent side payments before the game is played. This does not always lead to efficient outcomes, despite complete information and costless contracting. The characterizations are illustrated in a series of...

For groups that must make several decisions of similar form, we define a simple and general mechanism that is designed to promote social efficiency. The mechanism links the various decisions by forcing agents to budget their representations of preferences so that the frequency of preferences...

We study games played between groups of players, where a given group decides which strategy it will play through a vote by its members. When groups consist of two voting players, our games can also be interpreted as network-formation games. In experiments on Stag Hunt games, we find a stark...

A collective action or revolt succeeds only if sufficiently many people participate. We study how potential revolutionaries' ability to coordinate is affected by what they learn from different sources. We first examine how people learn about the likelihood of a revolution's success by talking to...

We study the optimal design of the rules of trade in a two-period market given that agents arrive at different times and may only trade with agents present contemporaneously. First period agents face a fixed cost of trading across periods, and their decisions of whether or not to trade in the...

We prove that for any equilibrium of a (Bayesian) game, and any sequence of perturbations of that game, there exists a corresponding sequence of ex-ante ε-equilibria converging to the given equilibrium of the original game. We strengthen the conclusion to show that the approaching equilibria...

We provide an overview and synthesis of the literatures analyzing games in which players are connected via a network structure. We discuss, in particular, the impact of the structure of the network on individuals' behaviors. We focus on game theoretic modeling, but also include some discussion...

We study collective decisions by time-discounting individuals choosing a common consumption stream. We show that with any heterogeneity in time preferences, utilitarian aggregation necessitates a present bias. In lab experiments three quarters of "social planners" exhibited present biases, and...