We here develop a model of pre-play communication that generalizes the cheap-talk approach by allowing players to have a lexicographic preference, second to the payoffs in the underlying game, for honesty. We formalize this by way of an honesty (or truth) correspondence between actions and...

Does altruism and morality lead to socially better outcomes in strategic interactions than selfishness? We shed some light on this complex and non-trivial issue by examining a few canonical strategic interactions played by egoists, altruists and moralists. By altruists, we mean people who do not...

We experimentally investigate behavior and beliefs in a sequential prisoner's dilemma. Each subject had to choose an action as first-mover and a conditional action as second-mover. All subjects also had to state their beliefs about others' second-mover choices. We find that subjects' beliefs...

Intuition suggests that in repeated games evolution leads to e fficient outcomes, we prove this result. Actions are used as implicit messages suggesting better ways to coordinate but also, in a subtler way, to assign diff erent roles to players. This allows to endogenously break the symmetries...

We show that in long repeated games, payoffs corresponding to evolutionary stable sets are almost efficient, as intuition suggests. Actions played at the beginning of the game are used as implicit messages and exploited to coordinate on Pareto optimal outcomes. Strategies following simple...