There are two varieties of timing games in economics: wars of attrition, in which having more predecessors helps, and pre-emption games, in which having more predecessors hurts. This paper introduces and explores a spanning class with rank-order payoffs that subsumes both varieties as special...

This paper explores a simple class of matching games in which individuals meet pairwise, unwittingly passing along a bad in a contagion fashion. It may be a private “bad”, like a counterfeit money or stolen art. Or it may be a collective “bad”, like a disease or a computer virus. Either...